


That's Not Why I'm Lonely

by lurrel



Category: Inception (2010)
Genre: Alternate Canon, Alternate Universe - Canon, Captivity, F/M, Hostage Situation, M/M, Minor Character Death, Torture, mental trauma, military situations, physical injuries
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-17
Updated: 2012-02-17
Packaged: 2017-10-31 08:41:48
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 32,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/342114
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurrel/pseuds/lurrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Lieutenant Arthur leaves his post at an international training camp for dream sharing with his name on classified research and a fondness for Flying Officer Eames of the Royal Air Force. He isn't expecting to see Eames again, and he especially isn't expecting them both to be independently captured by an international coalition hellbent on distributing all possible information on the PASIV device to the general population. After negotiations for their release, the world's leading dream psychiatrist is brought on board to help with their rehabilitation. Dr. Mal Cobb isn't sure if she's up to the task.</p>
            </blockquote>





	That's Not Why I'm Lonely

**Author's Note:**

> We're human beings, my son, almost birds,  
> public heroes and secrets.
> 
> Somos seres humanos, hijo mío, casi pájaros,  
> Héroes públicos y secretos  
> \- Godzilla in Mexico, Roberto Bolaño
> 
> “A person who is not inwardly prepared for the use of violence against him is always weaker than the person committing the violence.” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago

\--

Arthur has always been a bright boy. A loner, but not unpopular. Never disliked. He grew up pretty normal, he thinks, anyway. Single dad, college on an NROTC scholarship, a commission at age 21, a tour in Iraq. Normal stuff. Nothing extraordinary at all.

+

Eames, just Eames thanks, is born to a well-to-do, highly regarded family in British society. They might be royalty, but Eames won’t admit to neither title nor land ownership. He's neither the youngest nor the oldest, but he is the one who gets kicked out of least three posh schools and ends up in tabloid spreads a few too many times for his mother’s taste.

Eames doesn’t mean to be ill-tempered or surly, and in return for his mother’s gracious forgiveness, he graduates from Oxford. Of course, he also buys a motorcycle and picks up a few extra bad habits. He enlists at age 24 because it's that or have the purse strings cut for good, and he doesn't fancy prison.

#

Mal is a dreamer. She’d been a lucid dreamer in childhood, and grew into a dreamwalker, a dreamsharer, a pioneer on the vanguard of new technologies.

Here, in the now, she’s one of three certified dreamshare psychiatrists, people who have had the fortune/misfortune of trekking through a patient’s brain and coming out with secrets, diagnoses, maladies and cures.

Sometimes Mal Cobb wants to wake up.

\--

Arthur gets stationed in Afghanistan for his first hop. He likes his squad and doesn't mind the wind. He minds, instead, the way his legs are rubbed raw by marching, the heat, and the way sand sticks to everything, how it falls out of the envelopes of his letters and pages of his books. When the fighting starts for his unit, though, the thing Arthur misses the most is sleep.

He's not the only one that can't sleep when there's a possibility of mortar shells. The man who flies their squadron's drone keeps sleeping pills in his pockets and hands them out like candy in the evening, only Arthur's too nervous they'll make him sleep past call time. Sometimes they use pharmaceuticals as chips in poker games, but Arthur can only bet gum and cigarettes.

"Arturo," Blue says during a game, "as if we'd let you sleep in."

"You let Thompson sleep in," Arthur fires back. "You definitely had no qualms about letting Jackson sleep in and get latrine duty."

Rodriguez laughs. "But we don't like them," she says. "And they won't be back. They're almost done with the Corps.”

"But you, you'll be back," Nguyen says. "Maybe you'll replace that dickhead Johnson as our first lieutenant."

Arthur folds because it doesn't feel right to take the compliment and win the pot. The pills don't work, anyway.

\--

Arthur's a good Marine and turns out to not be a bad leader. Other Marines like him because he's serious and easy to trust, but not a ball buster. He's in Afghanistan for a long hop, a stop-loss hop, and doesn't get back to the United States for 17 months. His platoon is smaller than it was but at least no one was lost to friendly fire. No one killed themselves.

He's promoted to first lieutenant and gets pulled aside later that day, because he doesn't have anywhere to be but on base. He's looking forward to getting smashed before his platoon breaks up and goes home, and then he has to wait until their leave is over before he’ll see them again. He thinks maybe he’ll take a class at the local college.

It's his commanding officer that suggests MARSOC, Special Operations Command.

"You've got the scores for it," he says, and Arthur frowns.

"I haven't heard anything good about Camp Lejeune, sir," he says.

His CO barks out a laugh. "You shouldn't have heard anything about it."

\--

It's a long fucking seven months at Camp Lejeune. He learns a lot about himself -- he can tread water for an hour if he needs to, is more of a crack shot than he’s given himself credit for, and has leveled up in programming.

Arthur was expecting more negotiations training, but instead it’s more special reconnaissance, operations. How to not be seen or noticed, how to get the deepest intel.

\--

Arthur does another tour in Afghanistan, after that. It's familiar like visiting your parents after they’ve sold your childhood home would be -- uncomfortable but somehow soothing. He spends a lot of time in small towns, speaking with Afghan community leaders, and even more time waiting on base for something to happen. He's building a network, knitting it together. People trust him, tell him things. He's good at learning secrets.

Blue gets even better at flying the drone, and when they’re off-base, they’re way the fuck off-base, out in past poppy fields and straight into mountain sides. It’s a lot of waiting, monitoring, and watching.

The hardest is the incongruity of community building with these missions, where everyone who they see could be an enemy, an insurgent. Arthur gets twitchy with it sometimes, a shot of something hard after a recon mission to shake it off.

Rodriguez makes fun of him, tells him he worries too much, and the other special ops in his platoon aren’t sure what to make of him. It helps that his team runs smoothly, that they haven’t been ambushed yet. That he’s gotten village elders to sign up their men for police training. That he’s gotten three IED maps, mostly accurate.

If Arthur doesn’t command respect, his team earns the hell out of it that way.

\--

When Arthur gets back stateside, he's tired. Sleep doesn't come back like it did after his first tour. His platoon is down three people but he doesn't think his personnel requests will be granted, and he's concerned about heading back out while short-staffed.

But instead of being given a too-short leave and a too-long assignment immediately, he's recruited for something else. He's got the security clearance to attend special training, he's told. It's experimental. Very prestigious. If everything goes right, he'll be learning techniques he can put in the field as soon as he gets back overseas.

"It's a sleep study," is how it's described to Arthur, which doesn't explain the need for a full psych evaluation to gain clearance for the month-long training.

Arthur volunteers, suspiciously, and then signs up the most tech-savvy members of his team out of a sense of solidarity. He avoids the men and women who have children or spouses, but it still gives him a solid three-person group to take abroad. He doesn't want to be there alone with a bunch of eggheads, dreaming.

+

"It's a sleep study," Eames' commanding officer says, and Eames squints dubiously down at the list of personnel he's handed. He's one of the least qualified in terms of combat experience.

"And you'd better not fuck this up," he says, and Eames isn't sure why he's being sent at all.

#

Mal isn’t angry when Dom gets a plum training academy assignment, not really. It will be a little harder, as Phillipa is still quite young, but it will also be nice to have the house to herself for a change. She opens all the windows first, letting the wind blow through the house and sweep away all her misgivings about this project.

It’s not that the military grant isn’t the opportunity of a lifetime. It is, it will legitimize their life’s work, give Dom a chance to play in the fantastical and let her work to use the technology to help people heal.

It’s not even that the soldiers will use dreamshare to learn to kill. They’ll learn that anyway. But she worries about Dom, how he likes secrets and how he likes the edge of danger. It's the thought of Dom entering the unknown without her there that worries her the most.

She scoops Phillips out of her playpen and holds her close. It’s almost time to feed her, and Mal wonders if she’ll miss breastfeeding her, the intimate connection with another person. She’ll be weaning her soon.

\--

Arthur's not sure he likes anyone he's met at the training program, except for a sniper named Ariadne. She hasn't seen combat yet but she's done a tour in Asia, and she’s smart as hell and has a degree in architecture that she never paid a dime for. He can admire that kind of diligence even if he's not sure what it has to do with sleeping, just yet.

So it's a relief when the second plane of Americans lands and Arthur realizes that the people he was asked to recommend were actually there. His drone pilot, Blue, his demo expert Nguyen, and his second-in-command Rodriguez all get off the plane grinning and relaxed.

"That's for the plush assignment, Lieutenant," Rodriguez says as she pulls him into a hug.

"I heard you got a single," Nguyen says as he leads them back to the rooms on their assignment sheets. "What gives?"

"It says here you're rooming with Ariadne," he says, ignoring Nguyen and walking them back. "She's a door down from me, green as hell but smart as fuck."

"Oh, what, are you giving compliments now? Does our lieutenant have a heart after all?" Blue says as they find the room he'll be sharing with Nguyen.

Rodriguez snickers. "C'mon, you know that a _lady_ isn't really what he's interested --"

She cuts off just as a group of British Royal Air Force rounds the corner, her jaw slamming shut. Arthur just shrugs at her -- they're new arrivals, too.

One of them has tawny hair and an inexcusable amount of stubble, and he frowns while looking down at his room assignment. "Doesn't look like we're here, then," his companion says, but the man looks straight on at Arthur and smiles a little crookedly before walking down the hall and out of sight.

"That's more what he's into," Rodriguez says, but her voice is quieter.

\--

It's not a sleep study like Arthur expects. It doesn't cure Blue's god-awful snoring, for one, which was a pretty big motivator to invite him along.

It's a lot more chemicals and straps and dry heaving. The first tests are all solo runs in a room that looks like a dentist's office, only more cramped and darker. Arthur doesn't remember falling asleep and he wakes up with his head full of half-formed images and spits out bile while the man administering his drugs looks on wordlessly.

"It'll take a couple rounds of this to see if it's effective," Dr. Dom Cobb, the military's premiere expert on dreaming technology (whatever that was) told them in the introductory lecture. "It won't work for all of you, but everyone here was selected for their potential to be expert dream agents and architects."

Arthur's absurdly glad to not be the only person confused, but he still wants to succeed, and wants his team to be the best fucking dreamers at the compound. His team is more than happy to go along with this goal, and with the addition of Ariadne he's sure they'll be excellent "dream architects." In fact, he's pretty sure that's why she's there, since she doesn't have combat experience. Most of the other lieutenants and captains there view her tiny frame as a liability but Arthur sees speed. It helps that she's funny enough that the team invites her to play poker, without Arthur even asking.

But it's not just Arthur's squad that self-segregates. There are pockets of international troops and they keep to themselves too, speaking in hushed French or Japanese and eying each other warily. The initial week doesn't have them working together either; it's all individual trials with some new pharmaceutical compounds and talks from Dr. Cobb and a Dr. Miles about the expanse of dreamshare technology. How it'll offer a brand new training ground, even better than practicing with live ammo.

That part sounds fine, and it's a popular topic of conversation in every language. Everyone is impressed, blown away even by this technology. What no one wants to speculate about out loud is what the drugs are doing. He tries to nudge his team into telling him what they see when they go under, if it's a mass of memories brought back to life for them too, but it's too personal. Ariadne says that it’s beautiful when she’s asleep, but doesn’t say much else.

\--

Arthur doesn't mind the lectures. Ariadne even takes notes on a netbook, though Arthur's content to write down a few key points in a notebook. They're not the only ones pretending to be students -- the whole British squad takes vigorous notes. Arthur can't stop glancing at the man he'd run into during move-in, in part because of the wide stretch of his shoulders, but mostly because he asks questions. Not many people ask questions during the lecture. That particular Flying Officer (and almost all the Marines had a good laugh over Air Force ranks in Europe) asked things that bordered on disruptive but looped back into insightful, and Dr. Cobb seemed to enjoy having someone to spill tangents at.

"Are these dreams, then, going to be reflective of our inner-most desires? Something Freudian maybe? Or are they more controllable?" he asks, and Arthur appreciates the rumble of his voice almost as much as the interruption.

Dr. Cobb laughs, though no one else in the hall does, and launches into an explanation of how a dreamer can control their dream but can only suggest things to the subconscious.

"The ability to suppress subconscious desires is one we've been trying to fine tune," he says, and Arthur isn't sure that sounds like a safe way to begin any kind of military training.

Arthur doesn’t like asking questions during lecture -- it draws too much attention to himself, too much scrutiny that he doesn’t want. Instead, he waits around to catch Dr. Cobb after class, because he wants to talk a theory he has about projections and whether or not they’re innately hostile to begin with.

\--

The drugs don't always take. Blue just wakes up with migraines, to the point that Nguyen drags Arthur into their bunk and says, bluntly, "I think we should send him home."

Blue shakes his head and winces after.

"I wanna stay, bossman," he says and Nguyen snorts, shaking his head.

"Have you reported this to Dr. Cobb or one of his subordinates? You can’t go down a hallway without running into a doctor here, Blue -- how long has this been happening?”

"I just don't want to let the team down. Who's gonna cook you up dream food? Plus, you’re all shit at drone surveillance. No offense, sir."

“Look, I just--”

“There has to be something I can do,” Blue says, cutting him off, and Arthur sighs.

“Yeah, okay. Let me see what I can come up with.”

\--

It's not any less terrifying to discover that the drugs have worked. The first time Arthur goes under and remembers parts of it, it's like waking up twice. The first time he wakes up while he's still dreaming, he doesn't know what he's looking at. Arthur has never been a lucid dreamer, only an insomniac, has never had the pleasure of strolling through his own subconsciousness.

The sky is a mix of orange and purple, smeared with green, the light filtered down and tinting everything alien. He's out somewhere, near the woods, a place his father used to take him camping. The stars are absurdly clear, but he doesn’t recognize a single constellation.

He wonders what it means, and the whole dream hums along with him, trees rattling in a cold wind. Arthur wishes he had a fire, then decides he'll be able to make one fairly easily. Then he thinks he should just be able to dream one.

It works. It works and he doesn’t know how, only that where there wasn’t a fire, a fire is now crackling. He blinks and the sky shivers around him. His body feels alien, too, like he’s not in control of his muscles or bones.

He can feel it when the fire flickers in the pads of his fingertips.

When Arthur’s eyes open in the real world, Dr. Cobb is standing over him, excited.

“Your vitals seemed exactly right for lucid dreaming,” he says, and he’s smiling like he has a secret. “What’d you see? Do you remember?”

Arthur’s vision is blurry. “It was so real, but. I knew it was a dream. It was a forest.”

Cobb frowns and Arthur’s not sure why, and he yawns hard enough to crack his jaw.

“How could you tell it was a dream?”

“Things were just...different. It was like being on a tour, kind of -- like everything you’re doing is normal but the world around you is so surreal that it feels wrong. Like what the world looks like after a few months in the desert. Or maybe it’s like being in a city after you come back.”

There’s a long pause, and then Cobb smiles.

“I think we should celebrate,” he says, “You’re the first person that’s taken to it this fast.”

Arthur rubs at his eyes. “I thought most of the staff here were dreamers, like you?”

Cobb shrugs. “Not everyone cleared for this research can remember their dreams -- that’s the hardest part. So you deserve a drink.”

“And all the warnings about foreign intoxicants?” Arthur asks.

“Well. We have to take precautions, of course, but. A beer hasn’t hurt anybody yet.”

Cobb grins at him and Arthur is, absurdly, charmed.

\--

Cobb doesn’t blindfold Arthur on his way off base, but it’s a near thing.

“You’re just not supposed to know where we are,” Cobb says apologetically, and instructs Arthur to close his eyes until they reach the bar.

To make up for it, Cobb buys the drinks.

“So what do you think of this experiment so far?” Cobb asks as they settle in a booth with a pitcher of lager.

Arthur pours himself a pint methodically. “I guess I’m not surprised that Marines would be used as guinea pigs. I _am_ surprised at how many foreign nationals are involved.”

Cobb frowns. “The Somnacin is essentially harmless, you know. It’s even safe to eat.”

Arthur raises his eyebrows and drinks.

“Okay. I mean. Theoretically,” Cobb continues.“You’re...feeling okay right? No adverse effects? You’re not thinking of quitting the training are you?” He sounds increasingly concerned with each question.

Arthur shakes his head. “No, no, but. My drone pilot. He’s been in a pretty bad way since the Somnacin treatments have increased, but he doesn’t want to leave.”

Dr. Cobb strokes his chin. “Doesn’t he want to go home? Most people are happy to get out of this training so they can visit their homes, their families.”

“He doesn’t want to abandon the team. I was wondering if there was maybe a job for him outside the dreamscape. Maybe something mechanical he could learn.”

Cobb nods thoughtfully as he drinks. “I’m sure we could teach him how to assemble the PASIV, sure. But I’d need a favor in return.”

\--

Word travels fast: First Lieutenant Arthur is the new teacher’s pet, and drinking beer won’t kill you even with the Somnacin lingering in your system.

So nights that had been filled with awkward and sober card games start filling with buzzed conversations about dreamshare as beer begins to mysteriously fill the minifridges of their lodgings. Different teams start mingling.

The groups get smaller but, Arthur reasons, they’ll be walking through each others’ heads soon. Why not take precautions and win them over sooner rather than later? He starts by inviting the remaining members of the Royal Air Force to a five-card stud game.

Arthur’s squad plays for nickels while they wait to be joined. They’re in Nguyen & Blue’s dorm, since it has the best layout for moving the desk to the center of the room.

“So what was your private instruction about tonight?” Ariadne’s eyebrows wiggle suggestively at ‘private instruction,’ and Rodriguez sniggers.

Of course that precedes a knock at the door. The Brits are big guys, but they’ve all brought their own chairs, and they start setting them up.

“I’m Azembo, but call me ‘Zem,’” says the tallest, a black guy with a shaved head and a six-pack.

The other two are white, and Arthur already knows the name and rank of “Eames, just Eames, thanks,” but it is nice to know that he has a strong handshake, firm fingers.

“And I’m Davies, the one in charge of this lot.” Arthur shakes his hand, too, and they stare at each other for a little too long. Evaluating. Arthur needs to know the people who are going to be walking around in his mind, after all.

“Okay, let’s get the party started,” Rodriguez says, and Zem tosses his beer in the cooler.

“How’s your work with the professor going?” Davies asks. “I hear you’re getting some kind of publication credit out of this assignment.”

Arthur shrugs, taking a beer out of Blue’s cooler. “We’ve started working on landscapes for the training simulations.”

“Oh?” Rodriguez is shuffling the cards. “So that’s actually going to happen then?”

Nguyen looks impressed. “We’re going to let some contractors run around in our brains?”

Arthur nods. “That’s the plan, I guess. I’m a little concerned about the level of realism Cobb, and by extension the generals manning this project, are expecting.” It’s not always Arthur’s style to be candid, but he needs to know he isn’t the only one who needs an element of the surreal to keep himself grounded in the unreality of a dreamscape. “They want it to be indistinguishable from a real setting.”

"Whoever heard of a dream so real that you couldn't tell you were dreaming?" The tone from Eames is familiar enough from class, and his gaze is a little too intense when it falls on Arthur.

Arthur hasn’t cracked him yet -- he’s always amiable enough in their casual encounters, but there's a hard edge underneath.

He wants to tell Eames that sometimes, he's not lucid in dreams, despite being cleared for the training they were in.

Ariadne interjects before Arthur can. "You've never had dreams so real that you woke up disoriented? Natural ones, I mean.”

“Yeah, like when you’re in school or something,” Blue says, and Zem nods.

“Or a flashback,” Zem says, and there’s a low murmur at the table.

Eames shrugs. “Not really, no.”

His other squadmate gives him a sidelong look. “You haven’t ever been out there, not really, have you? You’ll understand then, what a dream like that is like,” Davies says, and Arthur feels relief.

#

Mal tries not to worry about the fact that Cobb thinks he’s found a protege. She can admit that the first feeling is jealousy, but the second feeling is concern that Dom is going to pull someone down with him when he finally gets in over his head.

Maybe that stings a little as well, but she’s never been the adventurous one. Her dreams are full of neat, clean architecture. She builds evocatively but not recklessly -- her goal is always to coax people into showing her their memories, but not to force their secrets into a house or a bank vault.

\--

Arthur waits after a lecture since Cobb asked him to, and he’s ushered into Cobb’s office.

In it is a long couch, soft and antique looking. It’s like a psychiatrist’s couch. On an old and polished side table sits a gleaming metal suitcase, oddly modern in the shabby wood decor of his office.

“Today, I want you to help me build,” Cobb says, “I’m not...well, you probably find it obvious that I’m a civilian contractor. I’ve been to Iran, Iraq, but never the wastelands of Afghanistan.”

Arthur frowns, because it isn’t all like that there. But he thinks about where he lived and worked, and then shrugs. “You want someone with real world experience to fine tune it.”

Cobb nods. “Right. Now you’ve been just working with a one, two person rig. This baby here can hook up up to ten people to one dream, if the dreamer is stable.”

“I’ll be the dreamer,” he says as he drags his desk chair over and motions on the couch for Arthur to lie down. “You can just fill it up.”

Arthur’s not sure how to ‘fill up’ a dream, but he’s willing to try. He opens his eyes to see himself in a vaguely European city, but it’s completely deserted.

“I said you should fill it up,” Cobb says from behind, and Arthur jumps, hand reaching for a knife he’s not wearing.

“I don’t know what you mean, Cobb,” Arthur says, feeling nervous now. “This is pretty much how my dreams always look.”

Cobb strokes his chin. “I guess I don’t really have enough basis to know whether this is highly unusual or just unusual. But most of the time, people fill up the dream with projections of their subconscious.”

Arthur shifts a little uncomfortably. “That sounds like a good way to make yourself vulnerable.”

“That’s the nature of this work, Arthur,” Cobb says. “You have to open up a little to make this work.”

“I don’t. I don’t really know if I need people to see my subconscious. Isn’t this just for running training drills?”

They’ve been walking along a street, and while there are cars parked on the curb they haven’t passed a single soul. The corner rounds to an enormous church, and as they step by the bell tower rings out in timorous round peals.

Arthur jumps and Cobb laughs. “Let’s see if there’s someone to meet inside there.”

He follows Cobb into the church, which is as empty as the streets were, pews shiny and untouched.

“I’ve never been inside a cathedral,” Arthur says to Cobb, “so I’m not sure what my id or super-ego would be doing, skulking around a bell tower.”

Cobb laughs as they walk past a huge crucifix at the front of the church.

“You carry yourself like a lapsed Catholic,” he says. The narthex only has the doors they entered through, no other entrances or exits.

Arthur shrugs and shoves his hands in his pockets. Jesus has a face of beatific agony, as though he’s at peace with the lurid red paint dripping down his wrists. Arthur appreciates Cobb’s attempts at anatomically correct crucifixion but he’s always been a little disturbed by the agony of Christ.

“Reformed Jew. I spent a lot of time with _Bubbe_ growing up,” Arthur says as he looks at the stained glass windows. “She wanted to me to grow up to be a righteous man.” The figures in them are moving and that’s the most eerie part of the scene. He doesn’t like being in a place he can’t recognize while simple laws of physics stop working around him.

A door opens, where a door wasn’t before, and out steps a light-footed young woman. She has dark hair and bright, curious eyes.

“I’ve missed you,” she says as she walks over to Dom, her feet bare and covered by a large, obscuring robe. Arthur isn’t sure what kind of threat she poses but he wants a weapon, doesn’t trust her.

Cobb laughs instead of tensing up. “Arthur,” he says, twirling her around like they’re dancing, “this is my wife Mal.”

Arthur frowns. “How did you bring her here? I’m the one populating this dream, right?”

Mal waves at him. “Sometimes Cobb misses me so much he brings me along.” Her voice has a French lilt to it.

“Don’t worry about it, Arthur,” Cobb says and so Arthur doesn’t. Instead he files it away for later, another interesting facet of dreamshare, and he chats with Cobb and Cobb’s projection until they wake up.

\--

It takes a few weeks, but the team exercises get started. At first, there’s no trust at all, and people get shot too fast and too easily.

Dom Cobb watches every exercise -- he only has one PASIV that can hold up to ten people at once, so he supervises. He tells Arthur that they’re the best at closed combat. Ariadne’s sniper eyes make up for the absence of Blue and his surveillance drone. But they don’t do well during long-range fights.

Not yet, anyway. Arthur isn’t playing through the exercises like a game, but his team wants to win. They’re filled with a need to be the best, from Blue watching intently as one of Dom Cobb’s assistants dismantles a PASIV to Rodriguez and Nguyen out on a firing range during after hours.

They’re fighting Cobb’s subconscious each time, though, so it’s easy to learn its tricks. Dom only has, at best, an academic knowledge of what being out in the suck of Afghanistan would be like.

\--  
Dom Cobb likes to talk about the amazing aspects of dreamshare -- the creation, the ability to learn about others, the ability to recreate history and the present and the future alike.

But there are gaps in his knowledge. Things he can’t explain to them.

Something Dr. Cobb never mentioned, for instance, is how strange it is to touch someone in a dream that you've never touched in real life. Arthur has never had a need to have his hands on Rodriguez's calves, for example, but he has to pull her out of the twisted husk of a felled armored vehicle as Nguyen takes her shoulders.

"Medic!" he yells, and then he watches her die.

The dying part Dr. Cobb did warn them about, but it doesn't get much easier the second or third time. Each first -- first time being shot in a dream, first time dying in a dream -- haunts Arthur at night when he sleeps. He takes solace mostly in the fact that he knows he can’t be alone in this.

\--

The war games start a week after. It’s 2 teams versus 2 teams, matched up by most compatible language skills, so Arthur and Davies get paired up. They’re given a few hours in the dreamworld to get settled in, get used to each other, and then Cobb is going to wake them up to play capture the flag with a team from France and Belgium.

They wake up standing near each other, each group in approximate combat uniform, and Davies and Arthur shake hands and start setting up tents.

Eames smiles at him as he’s scanning the area, a crooked smile full of crooked teeth. It's jarring at first -- Arthur's only used to the over-straight teeth of other commissioned officers and even most enlisted; Americans and their value of the braces his father never bothered with.

He isn't sure why he’s compelled to brush shoulders with Eames in the team simulation, but he wants to see how it feels. There's the jerk of ghost-feedback, the glimmer of how the other person _imagines_ you feel, overlaid on the guess at how the muscles in his arm should move.

It’s electrifying, and Eames jumps and then stares Arthur down. Arthur doesn’t look away but does consider that maybe he’s made a tactical error, that drunken poker night debates weren’t, in fact, flirtation.

Eames flinches when guns are shot, Arthur notices. In the dream, almost every movement is alien, but the sound of gunshot is familiar.

Their team wins.

+

Eames can't keep a dream together for shit. Dr. Cobb can't figure it out when they have their solo session together in week three -- the fewer people left means the more time for one-on-one instruction. It doesn't matter much -- the Royal Air Force squad was down to three people early on, so he’s coached them all personally. While Eames fails at dreaming, Zem is ace at being the anchor for their dreams. Eames works to fill them with characters.

"You've got such an amazing presence when you're not the dreamer," Cobb says, “More control over your projections’ behavior than I’ve seen before.”

“Maybe my subconscious is just a prickly bastard that likes to fight,” Eames says. Zem and Davies are running a simulation with Arthur and Rodriguez, but Cobb wants to talk to him away from the group.

“You have done well enough in creating a hostile enemy for your team to fight -- even without combat experience hardly anyone has come close to beating your group.”

Eames grins. “We do like to win,” he says, canines bared.

“Don’t get too cocky. Maybe one of the French recruits will come up with a dazzling talent next week.”

Eames laughs. “I think you’re over-estimating exactly how much control I have over this,” he says, waving a hand at nameless bodies shooting at his teammates.

“Have you tried creating specific people to be projections?” Cobb asks, tone nonchalant but eyes glimmering with a curious zeal.

Eames thinks about it. “I don’t think that would work as well. Right now, the projections basically act as heuristics -- like players in a sports video game, they’ll have a set number of responses but I’m not controlling them individually.”

Cobb nods, hands in his pockets. Bodies are piling up yards away.

“If what you’re looking for is a specific mimicry of someone, though, I think it could be done. Plenty of people dream of being someone else, don’t they?” Eames has wanted to be so many different people in his life, it’s hard to keep track.

“So say you wanted , would you build a specific copy of that person? Maybe lose control of the other projections, but if you could avoid them long enough you could trick someone with this particular forgery.”

Eames shakes his head. “No, because the precision wouldn’t be there. What if he acted wrong, or you got distracted and lost control of him? No, what you want is more of an actor, something that can respond independently.”

Eames had been startled by the natural violence of the projections of his military peers. His own subconscious didn't seem unreasonably bloodthirsty, but they were _canny_ , and he could push them in one direction or another if he thought Arthur or Davies was likely to invoke a particular strategy. What Cobb was proposing was useful -- one could do a lot in someone’s brain if they thought you were someone to trust.

It hasn’t escaped anyone’s attention that dreaming has implications far beyond technically advanced capture the flag, and he knows Arthur’s in on it. Eames wants in on it.

“Have you ever had a dream where you were a woman?” Eames asks, and Cobb doesn’t startle but he does raise his eyebrows.

“Getting a little personal, are we? We’re not inside my psyche right now, Flying Officer Eames.”

Eames grins. “I mean, have you ever had a dream that you were someone else? An actual dream, not just fantasizing about being a movie star or something. Dr. Cobb.”

“Yes to that question, then.”

“So why can’t I make that happen here?” Eames asks, then closes his eyes. The dream sun that Arthur builds is always brutal, beating through his eyelids, and he can hear Cobb murmuring to himself.

Eames thinks about Arthur, actually -- he doesn’t think Cobb or Davies would be wise, and Eames isn’t sure how to _add_ mass. Arthur, though, is about the same to him in height and slimmer. He thinks about the first lieutenant’s face, the way his eyebrows furrow in lecture and the way he glances at Eames when he thinks he won’t be noticed. The reverb Eames felt in his shoulder when Arthur knocked into him.

Eames settles into it, thinking back to wearing makeup and going on stage when he did plays in university. He tries to capture that feeling of sliding into a different skin, and then something _shifts_.

His skin feels tight, like he hasn’t had water for days, and moving feels wrong; his center of gravity is different, his muscles don’t respond the right way. Walking feels like driving an unfamiliar car -- moving from sedan to 18-wheeler. Still, Cobb’s shocked expression is worthwhile -- he must have done something right.

“How is it?” Eames asks, and feels his voice rumble differently. Arthur’s voice is always surprisingly deep, but it sounds different when he’s the one speaking. Eames runs his new tongue over unfamiliar teeth.

“Uncanny,” Cobb breathes, and he raises a hesitant hand to touch Eames’ jaw. His nerves jangle with it and he can feel the mask ripple a bit, unsteady.

“Now, to see how it holds up to the real thing.”

Eames turns around and stalks his way over the sand to Arthur and Rodriguez’s encampment. They have a small tent up, and Arthur’s on watch, waiting for some kind of ambush. Eames’ projections are out there, he knows, and he doesn’t know that Eames has let them totally loose.

“Hello, Arthur,” he purrs in Arthur’s voice when he sneaks up behind him.

Arthur is so startled he shoots Eames almost immediately.

+

Arthur might view him as mostly a liability, but Eames respects him. Eames is mostly impressed at the way Arthur's managed to keep his people from being booted. Blue hasn’t developed the stomach for dreaming -- Arthur makes him the PASIV operator while other team captains just let their men and women be sent home in the first week. Blue has a knack for it, from what Eames has seen, and when his team partners with the American Marines there’s no hangover of too much Somnacin.

It’s not that Eames doesn’t respect Davies, because he does. Davies was willing to take him on, but he didn’t fight for any of them to stick around. But maybe it isn’t an assignment like that at all.

He catches the American team in the mess hall, going over some kind of blueprint that Nguyen rolls up as soon as Eames saunters over. He smiles at them. He’s trying.

“What’s going on here, boys?”

Arthur frowns a little, but Nguyen shrugs. “A little strategizing,” he says, “since the Lieutenant here is a slave driver.”

“It’s true,” Arthur says, hands spread, and Eames sits down with his lunch.

“Strategizing? I thought all our tests were blind -- we don’t know what’s coming.”

“Arthur has managed to pick up a few extracurriculars, as it were,” Nguyen says, and Arthur looks sharply at him.

“President of the debate team? Footie? Joined the base’s newspaper staff?”

Arthur rolls his eyes. “All of those. I’ve always been an overachiever, and I’m dragging these assholes along with me.”

“Hey!” Nguyen looks affronted. “He’s all talk, don’t worry,” he says in a stage whisper.

“What could you be working on that isn’t how to kill everyone as quickly as possible?”

Ariadne joins them, a tray full of cheese fries from their improbable cafeteria. She pulls the paper out of Nguyen’s hands.

“Eames looks confused,” she says and Eames smiles.

“He’s snooping,” Arthur says, leaning over and taking some of her food.

“I’m just wondering what your leader here has planned for dreamshare, if it’s not elaborate games of capture the flag.”

She fixes a hard look at him. “Do you really think that’s the limit of this technology? Virtual reality war games?”

Eames shrugs. “That’s not really our place to question, is it?”

Nguyen laughs. “Sure. You’re right, Eames,” he says, and Arthur smiles. Ariadne snorts, clearly dissatisfied at having her debate prematurely canceled, and Eames feels a little petulant himself at being cut out so thoroughly from something that seems so interesting.

\--

Cobb’s office is organized, but not in any system Arthur can recognize. Cobb always seems to know exactly where everything he needs is, though, so Arthur tries not to feel too put off by the fact that his carefully written notes end up filed under a half empty coffee cup and on top of a stack of plastic bound theses.

“Here, see,” Cobb says, grabbing some looseleaf sheets of paper, “I got my wife Mal to talk to me about some of her patients about projection behavior and you’re right that they can be important sources of information.”

Arthur smiles up at Dom, thrilled he’s started to make breakthroughs in this new science.

“But the trick is to know what their motivation is. She says some have offered up important details, but others are prone to lying. And, of course, some won’t talk at all.”

“Kind of makes you wonder what the long term effects of having your projections routinely killed are gonna be.”

Cobb looks startled for a moment, and then he laughs. “I think you might be taking this thing a little too literally.”

+

They dream in sessions now, and waking is far less disorienting to Eames when it's in a room with people in it then when he’s alone with a technician.

Bits and pieces of the dream are still filtering back to him, so he sits supine on the slightly uncomfortable lounger provided and lets all the small flashes of color and movement come back to him. The soundtrack to this is Arthur's strong voice talking to Cobb about something or another. Eames realizes this is his chance, so he hustles to follow Arthur out the door.

Eames catches Arthur by the arm when they're leaving the sleep room, and Arthur jerks, spinning around with fist clenched. Eames almost can't help it -- shoving him against the adjacent wall is primed by his natural inclination toward self preservation. He should have guess Arthur would be jumpy, though.

"I just wanted to talk," Eames says, voice calm, keeping Arthur pinned against the wall by one wrist and one shoulder.

"Fuck off," Arthur snarls at him, and Eames just presses his hand on Arthur's shoulder harder, catching a nerve.

"You _look_ at me," he says, and Arthur turns his face to the side, a fine pink shading up his cheeks. Eames can see freckles there, as well, that he didn't notice in the dream. "You touched me, a few times."

"Is that what --? Fine, just. Let’s get this over with: I’ll beat the shit out of you and we can both get this out of our system." The tips of Arthur's ears are red, and his mouth is a miserable line.

Eames lets his hands drop, takes a step back and lifts them in surrender. "Hell no," he says. "I'm not idiot enough to pick a fight with you."

Arthur is crouched, dangerous. "What the fuck, then?"

Eames laughs. "I was trying," he says, rubbing at the back of his neck and trying to convey harmlessness, "to be flirtatious. Then you had to go looking for a fight."

Arthur startles, and then grins. "Is this how you flirt? Sneak up on people and pin them against the wall?"

He nods encouragingly, and Arthur's grin stays in place. "Oh."

Eames thinks Arthur's teeth look sharp, but they're not quite straight like most of his American peers'. He likes the way Arthur can snap from murderous to slightly pleased in almost an instant.

" _Oh."_ Eames looks at him and smiles back.

+

Eames is waiting for Arthur to return. Arthur's been gifted a single room, where most of them have to share. One of his squadmates said it was because he snored too much, but Rodriguez said it was because he needed to "get totally laid," and no one wanted to cockblock him.

It was, in all honesty, probably due more to his rank and the fact that Professor Cobb had already pulled him straight into a top-clearance-level project, but his squad didn't seem eager to even hint at the truth.  
Arthur's eyebrows shoot up the second he rounds the corner and Eames straightens up fast from his lean against the wall. He smiles.

"Arthur," he says, rolling the r for effect. "Just the man I wanted to see!"

The man in question looks him up and down, and then squints at him. "What the fuck are you doing."

Eames tries not to let himself get discouraged. "I thought we could spend an evening looking at your etchings?"

"You don't know a lot about romancing a person, do you?"

"Well, you’re not the only one who likes to do research. I asked around -- Rodriguez thinks you’re a cheap date, but Ariadne said you'd you’d want a romantic yet subtle approach. She fancies herself a keen observer of the human condition."

Arthur laughs, and it's Eames' first opportunity to study this phenomenon up close. His eyes crinkle pleasingly at the corners.

"Subtle...so you brought me wine?"

"It's not roses, which were her first suggestion," Eames says, and Arthur keeps smiling. He's leaning against the wall in a way that seems not entirely displeased, hips cocked invitingly to the side.

"I'm touched, really," Arthur says, still grinning, pulling a keycard out of his pocket. "Tell me more."

"I brought it for sharing?" Eames says, trying for a hopeful, yet innocent expression.

"C'mon in, then," Arthur says, holding open the door.

The room's got a desk with a slim little laptop on it, sharing space with a pen, a notebook, a pad of light green graph paper, and a calculator. There's also a metal framed twin bed made up with hospital corners, and a chair. On the dresser are a pair of sunglasses and a bottle of Jim Beam.

"Ah, I see that maybe wine isn't your poison of choice," Eames says, unsure of whether to take the bed or the chair.

"Well, I like things to be efficient. Wine doesn't seem that efficient, though I'm sure you could explain all the piquant and subtle flavors to me."

"I could, in fact. It's a skill that every low-grade nobleman is forced to learn at a tender young age."

Arthur smiles, grabbing the Jim and sitting on the bed. He motions to the chair, and Eames takes a moment to set the wine bottle down for maximum feng-shui on Arthur's desk before sitting down.

"I thought you'd make me work for it," Arthur says, unscrewing the cap of his liquor. "Maybe deny your lineage for a bit. You seem the type."

Eames thumbs at his chin. "Well, it's not as though I'm not in the official portrait on my family's Wikipedia page. The name isn't so terribly common, after all; I can see why you'd go digging."

"It's my job," Arthur says, shrugging. "Plus you're an untrustworthy foreign national."

Eames chuckles, then motions for the bottle Arthur's holding casually.

"We're in neutral territory now, dear, so you'll have to keep looking for other reasons to find me suspicious."

Arthur hands the bottle over, and Eames takes a drink. It burns and tastes fucking awful, which Eames expected, but he likes the rasp in Arthur's voice after a deep drag, the way his cheeks flush a little as they build up a buzz. The conversation goes easier after about three shots each.

"You're not one of those 'no kissing' types, are you?"

Arthur arches an eyebrow. "What the fuck?"

Eames goes for it, and Arthur's ready for him, mouth parting easily. He's surprised by how warm, how alive he feels when he reaches out and wraps a hand around Arthur's hip.

"You didn't need to get me drunk for this," Eames says.

Arthur laughs, hot puffs of air. "Maybe I just like bein' drunk," he says, Gs falling carelessly off his words as he drags long fingers through Eames' buzzed hair.

In bed, Arthur's no less lush, sprawling on his back and letting Eames tug off his shirt, making his dog tags clang together. Arthur's body is all lean planes, compact and wiry muscles, and he has a tattoo on his right arm and script on his left collarbone, Semper Fi.

Eames licks it and Arthur laughs, grabs his arms and pulls him more onto top, tugging at his tanktop.

Arthur lets out an appreciative noise once Eames is shirtless and he bites at Eames’ collarbone, then licks into his mouth.

"Fuck, you're hot," Arthur drawls, running a hand over Eames' abs.

"Yeah?"

"Yeah, fuck," Arthur says when Eames shifts, nudges his leg against Arthur's dick. Eames is surprised by how strong the grip on his arms is, the way Arthur grabs at him when Eames rocks against his dick.

"We should be more naked for this," Eames says, and then lets his teeth scrape up the tendon in Arthur's neck.

"Hey, no marks," Arthur warns, and reaches for Eames' belt. There's no fumbling there, Arthur's hands are absolutely steady even though his face is flushed with alcohol and body heat.

Eames wonders if Arthur could dismantle a bomb at that very moment, thinks he could probably rise to whatever challenge presents itself.

"Shit, I'm gonna need to blow you soon," Arthur says as he yanks Eames' trousers and pants off in one smooth pull. Arthur's laughing, though, curling his hand around Eames' cock.

"I can't complain," he says, "but we need to get your trousers off first, yeah?"

Eames palms Arthur's flat stomach, unbuttoning his fly with one hand and feeling his muscles flex with anticipation.

Arthur kisses him while his hands roam, and he kisses with a fevered energy. Eames is charmed, really, more than he expects, and finally they manage to get Arthur naked without untangling from each other on his twin bed.

His cock bumps up against Eames' thigh and his hips fit perfectly into Eames' hands.

"Hey, hold on," Arthur mumbles into his neck and then Eames is being rolled over, on his back under Arthur, who's smiling down at him.

"Great, yeah, okay," Arthur says and then kisses him again, and Eames rocks his hips up, their cocks rubbing together.

Eames moans into Arthur's mouth.

"Wait," Arthur says, out of breath, "you have condoms? Mine would require moving off the bed."

Eames bites at his bottom lip and fumbles around with the hand not on Arthur's waist for his trousers. He pushes Arthur off him with a hand on his chest and tosses him the wallet from his back pocket.

"Ooh, lubed and unlubed," Arthur says as he settles back in between Eames' legs. "And a pretty terrible driver's license photo." Arthur pulls the unlubed condom out and rips the packet open with nimble fingers.

"So I learned this trick," he says and then he's leaning over Eames' cock, slowly rolling the condom down with his lips, hot tongue following the latex, and Eames can't help but jerk his hips up into Arthur's mouth. There's no protest, and he shifts to lay a hand on the back of Arthur's red-flushed neck and groans.

Arthur sucks him deep, mouth tight around his cock, tongue flat. When Eames' fingers tighten Arthur gives a little moan and slides off, shifting further back on the bed to get a better angle.

"You don't have to be gentle," Arthur says and Eames thumbs at his bottom lip.

"Sure," he says. Arthur's cheeks are flushed and his eyes are crinkled in mirth, and he looks up at Eames when he gets back down to his cock, licking up the vein and reaching out to cup his balls.

Eames doesn't have time to be rough, though, because Arthur swallows around him, takes him to the root and that's new and sexy enough that he barely has time to squeeze a warning to Arthur's shoulder before he's pulsing into Arthur's mouth.

Arthur scrambles up on his knees, lips shining with spit, and Eames pushes through the post-orgasm haze to sit up and pull Arthur into a long kiss. Arthur's mouth is wet and when Eames reaches out for his cock, his jaw goes slack and body relaxes. Eames lets his hand move from the back of Arthur's head down to the small of his back, keeping him steady as he moves with Eames' hand.

"I wanna," Arthur pants at his shoulder, "I wanna see you all marked up." He pushes Eames back down on the bed and fists his cock, and Eames gets to see the full stretch of Arthur's torso, the way his skin turns pink, the way his muscles move under pale skin.

  
"Do it," Eames says, thumbing at the swoop of Arthur's hipbone and thinking of how he's far, far luckier than he has any right to be, that he's absolutely going to try his best on this assignment.

Arthur's eyes slam shut and he bites his lip when he comes, splattering over Eames' chest and getting caught in the hair there. He lets himself fall heavily onto the small mattress, squished between Eames' bulk and the wall.

"You," Eames starts to say but Arthur is grinning contentedly at him, rubbing his cheek against his shoulder.

"Sorry 'bout the mess, but fuck. You are hot," Arthur says, and he looks smudged around the edges now, so Eames heaves himself up to search for tissues of a towel. He manages to find a towel and a bottle of water, and cleans himself up as best he can while Arthur tells him to get back to bed.

"I don't think we'll fit here very comfortably overnight," Eames says and Arthur grabs his wrist.

"Shut up and cuddle with me."

Eames really doesn't have the heart to protest.

"For future reference," Arthur says, muzzily into Eames' shoulder, "don't trust Ariadne's advice."

"Oh?" Eames is half asleep already, and he runs his fingers through Arthur's short hair just to watch his eyelids flutter shut.

"You shoulda brought the roses."

\--

Things become routine as more people leave as the training increases in scope and scale -- the population drops with each dream they have.

Arthur stops even caring about pretense. The first time they leave the mess hall with Arthur's hand around Eames' wrist, Eames starts to worry. It's week three. The program is being renewed weekly, leaving the immediate future uncertain. This would normally suit Eames fine, but this thing is developing too fast, too sweetly.

Eames is too enamored with the slow press of Arthur's lips, the deepness of his laugh.

\--

“I thought you said he was a liability,” Cobb says to Arthur. Arthur’s sketching over a blueprint, engineer handwriting enough like Cobb’s own blocky letters that it’s hard to tell who’s written which comment.

It’s a maze.

“Fuck off,” Arthur says, but his ears redden noticeably. “The safe is going to a bitch to get to; I don’t know why you think most people’s subconsciousness is waiting to tear an intruder apart.”

“It’s not most people, Arthur. It’ll be the specific people _you’ll_ have to deal with, and if you hadn’t noticed, I’d like you to be safe instead of reckless and lucky.”

“I think I do fine keeping you out without a private army at beck and call,” Arthur says, and Cobb laughs.

“You’re an exception. I think it means you’re even more cautious with yourself than normal. My wife -- Mal,” and Arthur nods, because it’s not as though Cobb doesn’t bring her up incessantly (Arthur doesn’t mind) “ -- didn’t believe me when I told her that someone here didn’t have projections. She thinks you’re repressing an enormous trauma.”

“Maybe mine are like snipers -- it’s the projections you can’t see that you need to worry about.” Arthur smiles, makes it dangerous because Cobb is friendly but sometimes forgets that Arthur, that his students, are there to be trained to kill. To kill _better_.

“Anyway, I’ve just been thinking. We could bring him in on this. You’ve seen what he can do.”

Arthur shakes his head. “He’ll definitely be a liability then. Let him do a tour, see some combat first.”

Cobb shrugs. “Then watch what you say around him.”

It could be an insult, but Arthur knows better. Cobb’s worried about him, in a stupidly paternal way. It took Arthur a while to figure that out, and Arthur wants to tell him he knows better than to get compromised in a way that could jeopardize _this_ project.

It’s just. Arthur’s never slept better than with Eames' palm resting on his waist.

#

Dom's project takes an extra week, and then another. Mal sets up a secure connection so he can sneak her bits and pieces of his research and bounce off the ideas he's stealing from his colleagues. They don't know, of course, that every hypothetical he asks about psychological security is so close to becoming reality.

Mal primarily works with soldiers. She's been pulled in from her research in dream therapy at Johns Hopkins to do more direct work, specializing in the often-crippling PTSD that plagues the returning veterans of the West, and her work led to Dom Cobb.  
She likes practicing medicine better than she liked studying it, though her father always used to tell her she was well suited for academia. But sometimes she misses the feeling of boundless possibilities of the world that Dom lives and dreams in.

\--

The training comes to a close with one-to-one matches, after ranking each individual squad. The winners keep going.

Arthur’s team, inevitably, kills the trainees from the American Air Force Team (5 person), the Green Berets (4), the Royal Air Force (3), the Japanese Army (6), the French Navy (4), the Italian Army (4), and the last team of stragglers from India, Nigeria, Kenya, and Australia (6).

No one takes it personally, but they know better than to start up hostilities against that team of Marines anyway. It’s not like anyone there will ever be able to mention this training out loud to anyone not already there.

Their team has captured every flag, Ariadne sniped a record seven separate officers, and their Humvee only exploded once. His team, like the rest of the trainees, gets incredibly drunk on the last night there, after their epic victory.

The training also ends with Arthur’s name on Cobb’s paper and with the Royal Air Force taking a PASIV back with them.

Arthur’s hand lingers on Eames’ wrist the last morning, but they both know better.

+

When the program ends, it’s hard for everyone to let go of dreamshare.

“90 percent of you will probably never use a PASIV again,” Dom says at their closing lecture, “but I hope you take the lessons and practical skills you’ve honed out into the real world and show your supervisors that this research is necessary to keep on the cutting edge of modern warfare.”

It’s a pretty standard speech, Eames thinks, and he can’t help but feel a little resentful. Finally, after years of drifting, he’s found something he truly has a knack for, and the passion to hone it into a craft. And it turns out to be classified government technology he will neither see nor speak of again.

Arthur is surprisingly bashful when Eames meets him before their flights are scheduled to leave.

“This has been pretty great,” he says, looking at the floor, and Eames smiles, and Eames kisses him, gently, on the mouth. Arthur sighs and kisses him back. It’s a goodbye, but not a tragic one.

+

Davies tells him it’s for his own good, when Eames gets his marching orders.

“You’ll be back to the theoretical and the tactics soon enough, Eames,” Davies says, and Eames believes him. That doesn’t stop him from being a little resentful -- he’s finally found something he excels at rather than simply tolerates and it's right there. His CO has it, locked in an office somewhere, and he's sending Eames away from it.

When he's finally shipped out, he’s sent out to Eastern Europe doing minefield clearing and minor peacekeeping. It’s a dull work, and Eames spends time thinking of: the gleaming case Davies brought back with him, the veins on Arthur’s wrists, what it felt like to shed his own skin just for a moment, and drinks with rum and ice in them.

No one on the mission is thinking of tear gas, kidnapping, or terrorists.

#

When Dom comes home Mal’s more relieved than she expected. It’s been lonely without him; she still only sleeps on her side of their king-sized bed, and his weight and heat are comforting to have back. She can’t stop touching him, wrapping their fingers together when she moves past him.

Mal looks over the paper’s he’s started -- there’s charts and charts of data that need to be coded, analyzed, explained, but he always starts writing before all that. The insights are a bit harrowing and mostly she wonders about the mental health of his soldiers. The data covers chemical reactions, success of lucid dreaming both alone

She knows she’s lost the ability to dream without the machine, and wonders if it ever even came up. She would have liked a warning.

+

They catch Eames in Bosnia.

For a sick moment, the rush of adrenaline is thrilling, gunfire breaking the tedious monotony of traveling from city to city on enormous vehicles. Then Eames is hit broadside with panic. Everyone is scrambling with their guns but the shots aren’t coming from a town or a known encampment, and then the gas hits.

Eames falls out of the Jeep, gun in hand, and only a few people managed to get their gas masks on in time. Eames’ eyes are streaming with tears and he can’t see, just holds his gun up as though he’ll be able to shoot something.  
There’s a bright light, and then there’s nothing.

+

Eames wakes up with his arms handcuffed to the frame of a queen sized hotel bed.

His head hurts and his mouth is dry, and his uniform has been pared down to undershirt and cargo trousers. The lamp next to the bed is on, but the windows are all closed. He’s alone.

There’s a glass of water near the bed, on the nightstand, but both his hands are cuffed. He thinks that’s a particularly cruel torture, and settles back into the pillows. His eyes hurt when he keeps them open.

At some point, the door opens, and Eames squints up. Two men enter, and one of them sits on the neighboring bed.

“So,” he says, and Eames looks at him. He’s white, in his twenties, maybe early thirties. The man who is standing appears Han Chinese, and Eames pegs him at around the same age.

“So,” Eames says and his voice cracks.

The white man, the interrogator smiles. “I think we both want to do this the easy way. And we both know what you’ve been involved with. So it will be easiest for you if you just tell us about it now.”

Eames blinks. His mind is sluggish, maybe with drugs or maybe with a concussion, but he tries to run through all the things they could mean. Nothing from his time before the Air Force, surely, he was never involved in anything this big. And his mission in Bosnia was hardly classified information. It's obvious, really, but he doesn't want to think it yet.

“Can I have some water?” Eames asks, and the interrogator keeps smiling.

“You can get some water once you start telling us about what you know. So just tell us what you know, okay?”

Eames notices the standing man is armed.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” Eames says, and he starts to cough, awkward and painful while he’s on his back.

“We both _know_ why you’re here. We just want you to _tell_ us why you’re here.”

“If you don’t,” and this is from the previously silent man standing, “we won’t be able to take you someplace nicer.”

When he says it, his hand rests on the grip of his gun.

“I haven’t done anything to warrant this, and I really can’t think of anything upcoming that would be interesting to anyone. Especially when I don’t know who they are.”

The man with the gun looks down at the interrogator and they both laugh.

“You don’t know who we are?” the seated one says, and he leans forward. “Where have you been, Officer Eames?”

“I’ve been in fucking Bosnia, that’s what,” Eames says and his throat aches now. He doesn’t, refuses to look at the water next to him but it’s presences weighs at him, like a person looming over him.

“Maybe you haven’t been keeping up with the news then,” his interrogator says, “which is a shame.”

“You’re here at the courtesy of the Data Liberation Front,” says the other. “You’re our guest because we believe that information should be free, and you’ve got some important information locked away.”

“We’re going to free it,” he says as he stands up from the bed.

“Why the fuck am I here?” Eames asks. He’s angry now, through the haze of whatever sedative he’s been given. “What could I possibly know that you’d be interested in.”

They’re both smiling now. “Well, it’s up to us to find that out, isn’t it? We’ll see you soon, Officer Eames.”

They leave him there and he doesn’t know how long he waits. They do eventually return, it’s just to stick a needle in his neck and transport him someplace else. He can’t fight when he’s unconscious, and it makes him angry when he wakes up handcuffed in a solitary jail cell that he doesn’t know what country he’s in, how many days it’s been since he’s seen the sun.

Eames supposes there’s an issue of timing -- waiting for him to confess while cuffed to a hotel bed is probably both expensive and risky. If his squadmates are alive (and god he hopes they are), then they’ll know he’s been taken. There would be a body otherwise. They would know he’s still alive, maybe they’d even know why he was taken.

He knows this, and this is what he holds on to -- he’s a British citizen and the government doesn’t take kindly to terrorist organizations or hostage situations. That being said, the first month, maybe, that Eames spends as a prisoner is relatively mild. His cell is small, and he convinces himself that he isn't going to be killed. After all, any classified projects he knows, has access to, that they want, require him to be alive. He can see how alluring the life of a double agent would be, though -- to be treated well by those in power on both sides. To be able to give into that incredible itch he has to tell them everything.

They ask him about his mission. It starts off benign. He’s asked where he went to school, about his parents. Each day he’s pulled out of his cell to be interrogated he thinks they’ll tell him what they want.

They don’t.

What his captors do do is play games with him, games like gun on the table, keeping the lights on in his cell with music playing outside of it, trying to get him to stand for hours, but he doesn’t have the patience for it for very long. The kids -- and he knows they're not younger than him by much -- seem scared sometimes and he needs to strip their power any way he can. His captors talk a big game, but Eames doesn’t really have the patience for it.

The routine eases the bewilderment of his first interrogation. Eames has been there long enough that he's admitted to himself what his captivity is all about -- he’s only ever been involved in a single top secret anything. But he’s not going to say anything about Somnacin or dreamshare or Dr. Dom Cobb. That’s the promise he’s made himself.

He starts making things up instead: dreaming leads to mind control, the US and the UK were working together to secretly disrupt the political power across the Middle East, they could record your thoughts with machines. That your dreams can be recorded onto discs. That soon soldiers will be able to steal every one of your secrets even when you were awake. That the Thought Police already existed, but he wasn’t one of them.

+

It bites him in the ass. Eames has been warned his whole life about his mouth getting him into trouble so he can’t say he’s surprised when two guards yank him out of his cell and walk him at gunpoint to what appears to be an interrogation room. His interrogator has been consistent this whole time. Eames has named him The Inquisitor, because the man hasn’t been polite enough to introduce himself.

“None of your intel checks out,” the Inquisitor says, swinging open the heavy door to Eames’ room. “Not that you’re surprised by this, of course.”

Eames has half a mind to protest, but he’s being strapped into what appears to be a reclining patio chair. He shrugs as best he can with his hands cuffed in front of him and his shoulders chained to the seat.

“I suppose you thought it was funny. We’d just keep you in a cell and treat you nicely and you could just make up whatever shit came into your head and that we’d just publish it, that we’d buy it and let you go?” He’s holding something that looks like a switch, or a cane, and Eames feels dread pool into his stomach.

His boots are pulled off, and then his socks, and the man and woman who brought him to this room strap his legs down at the thighs, the shins, and then grab his ankles.

“Well I’m sick of your bullshit.”

The light taps of the cane tickle for a little bit and then the man stops and walks purposefully to the other end of the chair.

"Had enough? This will be your last chance to tell us what we want to know."

Eames fights the urge to roll his eyes and then shakes his head. “I doubt you’d stop -- this seems like what gets you off.”

The Inquisitor laughs. “I might enjoy this but only because you don’t seem to understand the importance of why you’re here.”

He steps back to Eames’ feet, and Eames starts to struggle again in earnest. His legs are held tight, though, and his muscles have waned considerably over six weeks.

"What you know can change the world, you realize. We just want it to change from the ground up, even out the playing field,” he smiles. "Before you have a chance to do anything too terrible."

“I guess,” he continues thoughtfully, bending the rattan cane between his hands, “that I can tell you that we really don’t give a shit about what you were doing in Bosnia. We want to know about dreamshare.”

Eames doesn’t have time to give a witty reply -- _this much has been obvious since the day I was brought here_ \-- because the man swings the wood into the sole of Eames’ feet with quadruple the force of his earlier hits.

Eames doesn’t scream, but it’s a near thing. He makes a choking sound instead, his whole body jerking in the chains, scraping the feet of the lounger against the concrete of the floor.

The next hit slices across his heels, both at once, and the air has been crushed out of his lungs and replaced by pain. He can’t scream for the third hit, can’t breathe, and everything is shoved out of his mind as pain shudders through his legs, his ribs, into his skull.

Eames didn’t expect it to feel like this. Each strike reverberates through his nerves, where they end in the delicate arch of his foot.

He’s hit sixteen times and his brain goes static, everything beaten out. There’s a pause and Eames can feel the room ebb back into his perception slowly.

“So, are you going to talk?” The Inquisitor is smiling blandly down at him and Eames doesn’t have enough spit in his mouth to tell him to go fuck himself.

“Let’s try this instead.” The rattan cane drops to the concrete floor and he pulls out a length of black cable, swings it in the air. “Did you know that the foot has twenty six individual bones? The feet together have about 1/4th of the bones in your body.”

The cable works -- when it slams into his foot he can only picture each tiny metatarsal shattering on impact. The Inquisitor stops after about twenty hits -- Eames loses count because he’s trying to remember to breathe, that he is most likely not going to die from this pain.

He can hear his breathing coming in strained wheezes. The woman who was holding his leg down has moved to his head and leans down.

“Are you ready to talk?” she asks, her voice soft and inviting. Her blonde hair falls a little onto his face. “This will stop if you tell us about dreaming. What are they doing with dreams, Officer Eames?”

Eames closes his eyes and shakes his head. He thinks of Dom Cobb, who had a photo of his daughter and his wife in his pocket. Of how disappointed Davies would be. Of how hard Arthur’s team had trained.

He can’t think about much after that, because the Inquisitor continues.

When the Inquisitor stops again, Eames is someplace else. The pain in his feet starts to recede into a buzzing noise in his brain, and he feels limp and hollowed out as he’s unstrapped. The door opens, letting a sliver of the hallway’s light into the dim torture room (it’s more of an office, really), and someone is talking. They sound...excited? Worried?

The Inquisitor certainly doesn’t look happy, and Eames feet start buzzing with pain, shooting up and exploding in his knees and behind his eyes, when he is yanked into a standing position.

“Fuck,” he manages to say, gripping one of his captors blindly for purchase.

“We have to transport him immediately,” are the only words he does manage to decipher before he passes out.

\--

Arthur is driving their vehicle. He doesn't always, but he is today, with Ariadne on top scoping the terrain. Blue's in the back, fucking with the comm radio, bitching that they're still using the lowest tech communication devices possible.  
They’ve been assured that this route is safe, or as safe as any road this far out can be. No one is nervous because things have been relatively quiet lately.

Arthur only occasionally thinks of the bullet-proof pelican case in the back of the vehicle. A mission that needs him to unlock it, to retrieve a silver case from its insides is coming up. He’s not sure how he feels about it -- they’d trained to fight, not to steal, but. He could be good at both.

#

The Data Liberation Front isn’t new to Mal, but Dom brings home details that the news never delves into. She doesn’t search it out; every day she hears another story about war, why would she look for more?

“Sometimes they do interesting work with intellectual property,” he says, “but this. This is reprehensible.”

She doesn’t ask because she’s seen his papers, scattered all over his desk -- news clippings and printouts. There’s been a string of kidnappings. A bombing left unclaimed in Afghanistan that lead to a soldier going MIA. An attack on a British peacekeeping force in Bosnia. Two women kidnapped from two different science academies in France and Brazil, respectively.

It seems random at first, but Dom looks more worried when CNN International breaks the news on what seems like a random explosion in Mombasa, Kenya, than he did when it reported potential terror alerts in the States. Mal contemplates canceling their cable so Dom will stop watching so many news reports.

There used to be a time when Mal would do anything to trade careers with Dom, who gets to dream and dream and dream. These days, though, the tense line of his mouth makes her grateful for her patients and how tangible her work is, even when she has to utilize the PASIV to help them.

“They started as hackers, you know?” Dom continues. “But they’re moving into becoming international terrorists. They’re releasing military secrets, and not just from the United States, either.” He’s watching the news from the kitchen, where he’s washing dishes angrily.

“Their hacking wasn’t international terrorism to begin with? Or is it excusable when it’s just corporate targets?” Mal asks this with an eyebrow arched.

Dom won’t be deterred. “Corporate websites going down don’t lead to soldiers being killed, Mal. And you know what kind of technology exists out there -- do you think that information should be broadcast to everyone?”

She shrugs. “I didn’t expect dreamshare to be hidden forever, Dom. The medical applications alone would make its secrecy morally reprehensible.”

“It’s not ready,” he says, firmly, and Mal sighs. He means _they’re_ not ready, the community of doctors and academics and military advisors aren’t ready. The research is too risky to let anyone see.

“I suppose it’s never popular when the underground tries to go mainstream,” she says, and then, feeling emboldened, changes the channel.

+

When Eames wakes up again he's not in a plush hotel bed, or chained to a pipe in someone's basement. He supposes the cot and the grated door are a happy medium, at least.

"You're awake!" A young black woman is looking into his cell, a gun in one hand and a smile on her face.

"Am I?" he says, but his tongue is heavy and his mouth is dry. It comes out sounding cracked, incomprehensible.

"Lemme get you some water." Her English is accented, but he can't place it.

She hands it to him through the bars, and his head swims when he sits up to grab it. It’s starting to be a familiar feeling.

"Sip it slowly," she says, "you've been drugged for a long while now."

"You're nicer than the others," he says after taking a few measured sips. It's harder than he expected to keep the water from sloshing down his chin.

She shrugs, braids bouncing off her shoulders. "Guarding an angry prisoner sounds like a lot of work to me."

"I'm not really the easiest patient. Your fellow jailers might have informed you of that, though." Eames doesn't really have the stamina to look at his feet, hidden under his blanket, so it might just be a new and different lie.

"Lucky I’m a pretty easy guard. My rules are simple: I’ve got the gun, and you're not going to surprise me. I'm not here to be a tyrant, and all that shit that happened your last place...it's not gonna happen again, okay?"

He peers at her. "I suppose I'll have to take you at your word until something proves otherwise."

"That's right. We don't...we don't condone that kind of torture."

"Only psychological torture then? Or maybe something worse?"

She frowns. "It's for everyone's good. You're lucky we don't want you lost in the collateral damage."

"I'm afraid," Eames says, laying back down and closing his eyes, "that’s a pretty shitty definition of luck.”

She shakes her head. “Okay. I’m Grace.”

“I’m charmed,” he says, and she snorts and walks out of his sight.

He realizes then he didn’t even bother to ask where he was.

+

Grace turns out to actually be a nice guard -- she brings him books to take up the time and asks about his feet. The Data Liberation Front doesn’t have a doctor on staff; they don’t even appear to have someone versed in first aid, and so it falls on Grace to make sure the weals on his feet don’t get infected, that he doesn’t get a fever.

“I’m not sure if I’m supposed to wrap your feet or let them rest,” Grace says the first time she hands him a soggy bag of ice to bring down the persistent swelling.

Eames makes sure he doesn’t yelp when he starts to ice them, despite how tender everything feels. “The toes will need taping to heal. It’ll take a long time, though,” he says.

She frowns, stepping out of the cell to lock him in. It should rankle, that she doesn’t consider him a flight risk or even dangerous, but he’s not.

"Well, I’ll tell your next guard to get you tape. Hopefully I won't be around for too much longer."

"Getting sick of me already?" Eames asks. It’s weak, and he feels weak but talking to her is at least talking to someone.

She rolls her eyes and shakes her head. "No. I requested a new assignment when I heard the next prisoner we're getting is Kenyan."

"Wouldn’t you want to stick around to help out a fellow countryman?” Eames’ heart is hammering hard at the thought of another prisoner -- he can see the empty cells across the hall from his, carved into stone walls that imply an underground location.

"Absolutely not.”

"Oh? Not feeling as devoted to the cause when it starts to get personal?”

"Don't you think it would have been worse if you showed up here and your guard was British?”

Eames thinks about it. He'd half expected it, to be honest, a little internal mix-up about dreamshare, or bombs, or minor royalty. Anything really.

"I'd rather you stayed," he says instead.

“I’m flattered, truly.”

“Why are you here, then? I haven’t even been interrogated for a week.”

“You’re healing,” she snaps, and then sighs. “I’m here because they needed hackers and I needed money, and I’m your babysitter because I’m the only one that volunteered to keep you from dying when they brought you in.”

He processes this. “Then what am I doing here? I’ll be stuck in this cell for a year if they’re waiting until my feet heal up to interrogate me again.”

“They don’t need to interrogate you any more, Eames,” she says, looking a little concerned. “You didn’t talk, but like I said, someone else is coming. You’re here for testing once he gets here.”

She smiles in a way that’s meant to be reassuring but Eames doesn’t feel reassured at all.

\--

There's a bag over Arthur’s head when he wakes up. In fact, it’s hard to tell if he’s woken up at all, for a moment.

Arthur has been trained to count time but it's hard to when he keeps blacking out. When he's awake he can't see anything either, but they keep trying to make him walk when he’s conscious.

Someone keeps kicking the backs of his calves and making him stumble more than the pain in his leg, and he'd snap at them if his mouth weren't so dry. The floor is solid, feels like cobblestones, but it’s not much of a clue. At some point he’s in a vehicle and he can hear the call to prayer, so he can’t be too far away.

He thinks of Ariadne’s body, of Blue shouting, of bright lights, and doesn’t dream.

+

“What are their plans with the new hostage?” Eames says instead of hello.

Grace is bringing him the usual breakfast of toast and a hard-boiled egg. Sometimes Eames gets a box of orange juice, but not today. She shrugs.

“They won’t torture him like they did you, if that’s what you’re asking.”

“What a relief to hear he’ll be tortured some other way.”

“He’ll probably be put through the paces. Sleep deprivation, stress positions, that kind of thing. Hopefully he’ll be more cooperative, and faster.”

“You don’t sound particularly convinced.” Eames keeps prodding, because Grace has her hair pulled back which means she’s feeling relaxed, ready to relay information even if it’s not her intention.

“I’m not here to be convinced, okay? I’m here to make money and then get the fuck out.”

Eames blinks, and shifts. He walks around the cell at least once a day now, because he’s terrified of bedsores and of his muscles wasting away, but he’s saving his strength.

“Are you any good at it?” she asks, leaning against the wall near his cell, just out of his sightline.

“Being a prisoner? I think you’d probably know the answer better than me.”

“At dreaming.”

His hackles raise.

\--

Arthur is finally dumped at his destination. He’s walked inside of a cell and shoved against the back wall.

“You can take the bag off once the door closes,” gets grunted at him and he waits to hear a heavy door swing shut.

The room is the kind of dark that never gets really pitch black, light seeping through the stone walls where they’re not well sealed. There’s a foam pad on the group and nothing else, and Arthur is fucking cold because he’s been stripped down to his standard issue camo pants and undershirt. His body aches and feels strangely light, no longer carrying pounds of gear.

He curls in a ball and hopes they don’t forget him here. Then he hopes they do.

They don’t.

\--  
Arthur feels like he's close to dying.

He's not. He knows he's been grabbing enough sleep in fits and starts to keep himself alive for a few more days. He's not going to go crazy. Arthur's trained, has been trained for this.

The exhaustion, though, hammers in his skull, under his eyes, the hollows of his ears as his blood churns sluggishly through his body.

He's been standing for about a day straight, at his best estimate, hasn't slept for at least 36 hours. The exhaustion aches, all his joints feel twice as big as they should. His twisted leg is a giant throb, oscillating between ignorable and intolerable. Every twenty or so minutes, he finds himself nodding off only to be slapped or hit awake, jerking with surprise. LEDs are shined in his face, but the room is filled with the same fluorescent glow of any standard office building.

He's beginning to wish they'd tied him to something because he can feel his legs buckle but he can't do much to relieve the pressure except to bend them a little. Some of his captors have let him lean against the wall, but not all.

"Are you ready to talk to us about the PASIV yet?" Arthur wishes the people interrogating him were wearing some kind of uniform; it would be less disconcerting. His vision is swimming enough as it is, so he can never be sure if there are two or three or four people asking him about dreamshare tech.

"Aren't you guys," he manages to rasp, " _tired_ of asking me that?"

Arthur gets slapped across the face again, but it's the first time he's smiled since the explosion.

\--

The isolation cell feels a little like a blessing when they finally shove his failing, silent body into it.

Arthur forces himself to drink in small sips from the water bottle that's tossed in after him, his hands shaking so badly that he's terrified he'll spill it everywhere. It stings when his dry lips crack as they dampen, and part of him just wants to use half of it to wash his face.

The new cell is actually dark, and that's another relief. There's a mat in whatever room he's in, thin but not the hard concrete of the floor, so he carefully lowers himself on it and feels a rush of relief so fast it's almost painful in his legs, his hips.

He carefully caps the bottle of water after getting through half of it and curls on his side. The exhaustion makes him nauseated, his body trembling. He wonders if this is a trick, if they’ll wake him up after he hits REM sleep and ask him question after question after question about how he’s been trained to steal secrets, what government was he targeting, what were the names of his teachers, his superiors.

Arthur realizes he can hear himself breathing, because it’s loud and labored, and he shudders. Time, he realizes, has slipped away sometime between nine hours of standing and then four of kneeling with his hands cuffed and held behind his head. He doesn’t know how long they made him stand after that, just that the person who sat behind the room’s only furniture -- a desk -- rotated out at a random schedule. Some asked questions, some hit him, some demanded he squat or hold other positions. He complied with their requests but never answered a question -- they got his name off his dogtags and that’s all he’s going to let them have.

He’s been trained for this.

Sleep takes a long time.

+

Eames is almost embarrassed by how fucking thrilled he is when Yusuf arrives.

Grace isn’t hostile, but she’s still the enemy. Yusuf, Yusuf is a peer, even though he gets a nicer cell, better food, and all the blankets he needs. Grace is still there, and introduces them.

“You talked, didn’t you,” Eames asks him on the third of Yusuf’s stay -- they’re unsupervised at night because none of the people currently manning the Data Liberation Front’s headquarters are willing to stay in the prison hall where there’s no internet connection or reliable power source.

“I told them enough. It’s more that I promised them some _things_ , and I apologize in advance for that, but.” He spreads his hands out, shrugs.

“What do you do, precisely?”

“I’m an independent contractor,” he says with a grin. “Apparently, our data liberating hosts found my fee too high.”

“What would they be contracting you to do, is more like what I meant.”

“I’m a chemist,” Yusuf says. “Degrees from a few places, including Berkeley, if you’re the type to believe paperwork.”

Eames isn’t. “So, you’re a dream drug dealer?”

Yusuf just keeps smiling. His face is gaunter than it should be, brown skin paler than it was when he first arrived. But he’s free of bruises.

“You might call it that. I like to think of myself as more of an adventurer -- a pioneer if you will.

+

Eames is, predictably, pulled out of his cell and taken to a small, nondescript room. The lounger he is told to lay on is at least more comfortable than the one he was tortured in.

“We need you to build,” says a woman identified as Rabia by Grace. “Dreams. Now that we have a PASIV we need someone to build us dreams.”

"Ah, well. That's not exactly my specialty, is it?" Eames tries not to think about the fact that Yusuf handed over a PASIV because he can’t stand the thought of his only companion being a bloody traitor too. He takes a deep breath.

She scowls. "We can't keep them stable. I was assured, by very credible sources, that you've been trained by the best."

Eames smiles; it could be easy keep this up. The woman he's talking to is too young and too open to even fight back, and it's easy to fall back into an old character. "And they made me the best, darling, but I'm not a builder. I'm not an architect of any kind."

The woman snaps.

"So show me what you do." She starts to unwind the leads.

The PASIV on the room’s metal table doesn’t look like any he’s seen -- it’s battered and cobbled together by tapes.

“Where did you get that, exactly?” Eames asks.

“The blueprints for this particular machine have already been released,” she says, smiling. It looks more like a snarl, her white canines pointed. “Pretty soon our satellite networks will have prototypes running.”

“Looking to liberate more data then? Pull it out of the people who don’t talk after a few rounds of bastinado?”

Rabia does snarl then. “That was a mistake, but don’t act all moralistic about torture to me. You’re just as complicit as any other Westerner.”

She works the lines and he turns his arm, elbow ditch up. What else can he do, really?

“We’re setting the blueprints free so people can protect themselves,” she says as she settles down in the room’s second chair. “So people know what we’re fighting against.”

She hits the plunger and Eames closes his eyes.

\--

The problem with the way Eames dreams is that he has no concrete sense of place.

Instead, he opens his eyes and color drips all around him. It starts off like a Mondrian, primary colors broken up by bold black horizon lines, but the color sinks around him, blurring.

Rabia is there only sometimes, flickering in and out of his line of vision. Eames isn’t exactly sure he’s in a three dimensional plane all the time but doesn’t think much of it. Without a backdrop that looks like reality he’s free to focus on things that aren’t real.

What he’d really like to see, he decides, is something like the inside of a Rothko cathedral, walls covered in bold smears of color. If he could dream up a museum he would, but the walls shake and melt into the color so he just imagines the gradients, the booming noise of the paintings.

It’s like waking up with synesthesia, to be inside Eames’ dream. Rabia can’t, can’t make herself solid, so he hears her yelling only when a mouth appears, only sometimes attached to a flickering copy of herself. It looks like a bad television signal, interrupted by blacks and crackles in film.

Eames reaches out into the now teal backdrop of his own mind and his hands come back swirled with color and he laughs, the sound exploding into bright splashes of paint.

He wakes up and the room is grey, dull and concrete, and Rabia is frowning.

“You’re trained in dreamshare,” she says and as it’s not a question Eames doesn’t feel up to responding. His head is aching with a particular throb, one that’s slowly building speed and power. In about 14 minutes, he estimates, he’ll be praying for death and laying immobile wherever he ends up.

“So what the fuck,” she continues, getting up and unsteady on her feet, “was that? An art history lesson?”

“We’re not fucking around,” she growls, grabbing his face in her hand and he just stares up at her.

“I didn’t mean it as a joke, love,” he says, the tongue in his mouth heavy and awkward. “It’s just that I’m not very good at the same things you don’t appear to be very good at.”

Her hand drops to her side and it’s almost like she’s snarling. “You and Yusuf are both worthless fucks,” she says and bangs on the door. “Take him back. We’ll need the third to get any work done here.”

He lets himself be led out, shuffling slow, slow, slow, but he tries to not forget that.

\--

The isolation cell is probably where Arthur will die, he decides. He’s devised a regimen of push ups, sit ups, and various other PT exercises to keep himself from wasting.

All of them hurt, because his leg has set wrong. He can’t pop it into place and his knee is twisted, probably torn up. The cuts from shrapnel ooze blood slowly into his pants but they’ve been cleaned, probably while he lay unconscious in a van somewhere. He doesn’t think about his shoulder at all and ignores the protest of various muscles and ligaments when he taxes them -- he needs to be strong if he’s going to live.

Most of the day, however, he has nothing to do. He has a candle, and a matchbox, and that’s it. No books, no torture, no interrogation, nothing. He’s not allowed to speak when they take him to the toilet, not allowed to look at anyone.

He doesn’t light the candle every night because he’s afraid it’ll burn down to the nub, and then what will he do.

Arthur also only lights his candle sparingly because the flame is so entrancing. It must be full of a life that’s all but disappeared from this place. He knows he can stare at it for hours, amazed at sudden color for his eyes to see, movement.

Anything. He’s spent hours mesmerized by his own shadows playing across the wall.

Each day spills into the next with a kind of hazy lack of interest and Arthur feels like he’s losing bits of himself with each hour that passes.

\--

By week seven, Arthur is ready for death. He sees nothing more interesting than himself, his walls, and the floor on his way to a primitive shower set up, pipes with cold water. The guards won’t talk, except one who will whisper ‘hello’ shyly as he sets down Arthur’s breakfast.

He tries to grit out the pain and keep fit, but his hip and thigh and knee, especially knee, ache so badly he has to stop exercising too. The pain has become quicksilver through his veins. He tries every so often, wincing and sweaty and ultimately losing hope.

Instead, he lays on his mat and dreams. He thinks about everything in his childhood, recalling and then rebuilding each of the nine homes he lived in growing up as his father traveled, first with the Air Force and then as a contractor. Arthur’s friends all believed his father was a spy, an image he didn’t try to dissuade them of.

He can think of each house. Carpet on stairs, the apartment that had peeling lavender wallpaper and no space for his desk. No stairs, one bathroom. He builds them each methodically in his mind, imagining their wooden skeletons. Each component has to be exactly right, each wall and floor and electrical socket.

Each image is sharp and incredibly vivid.

Sometimes he tries to populate these houses, but that gets harder with each passing day. To visit people, he has to recreate more than a house. Trips to the beach with his father, that time his father left him at his new high school, a birthday or two.

He never thinks about his father’s cancer.

One day he floats so far back in his mind that he thinks. He thinks for just a second he can imagine his own mother, from photos. Maybe she’d aged up here, to catch up, but he sees her towering over him, lifting him into her arms. She’s warm and smiles and he can see his own mouth there, in the corners of her lips and the dimples in her cheeks.

When she disappears he wonders if he’s already died and this is hell -- tantalizing glimpses into what his life could have had. What it could have been.

Arthur thinks about his life and creates memories, photographs in his head that he can recall in stunning high definitions. He regresses backward because each day in the future is the same, the same, the same.

+

Grace unlocks his door and gives him an extra water bottle when she leaves -- he’s lucky she’s on duty, because she doesn’t mind if they talk. He settles into his cot and wraps a blanket around his shoulders.

“How are you feeling?” Yusuf asks. His voice projects well even when he whispers, clear and low with a physician’s calm.

“Not great. A little hungover.”

“They’re saving the untested formulas for you, I see.” Yusuf is standing, pacing the tiny area of his cell.

Eames finishes half the bottle of water in one go, gasping after. “What is that supposed to mean?”

“I’ve been working on customizing the standard Somnacin blend, which would probably be different from whatever you’re used to anyway. But not everything’s been tested. The side-effects of some of what they found in my lab could be severe.” He sounds like a professor when he explains, matter-of-fact.

Eames coughs. “Severe.”

“Nothing lethal,” Yusuf says, chuckling. “Not yet, anyway. I didn’t get that far -- drug up a target and then once you leave, he dies? It’d be elegant.”

“I guess it’s cleaner than shooting him, yeah, but that’s not what dreams are for.”

“What are they for, then?” Yusuf asks, his voice sharper.

Eames opens his mouth but closes it again. He doesn’t think they’re limited to training field, to kill fear in the minds of young soldiers. But there has to be something beyond using them to steal as well.

“That’s right,” Yusuf says when no answer is forthcoming.

\--

Arthur gets in a fight.

It’s inevitable, really. His leg has been healing -- it’s healing wrong, the shrapnel scar huge and the skin pulled tight. He knows the fracture wasn’t aligned right, that the limp isn’t going away.

But it’s healing, is the thing. He’s able to do pull ups and ignore the pain in his shoulder, push ups again. He does it until he’s exhausted, until his vision blurs because he can’t go mad here, won’t, refuses.

It happens because a guard brings him an orange.

Arthur’s not supposed to look at them, but there’s a few that seem sad, or confused. His guards for the first five weeks were stoic and silent, but after a change of guards, there are two who are nicer.

One doesn’t speak English very well but introduces himself as Chang, gripping Arthur’s hand in a firm handshake.

The other, Amal, sneaks him candles and smiles a little sadly when Arthur asks for things like a newspaper or a book.

Chang, though, Chang brings him the orange.

Arthur is almost entirely undone, which Chang doesn’t seem to understand. Arthur’s Cantonese is shit but he thanks him over and over until Chang looks a little disturbed, nodding and backing out of the cell.

It’s just so fucking orange. He can see the color even in the room’s watery light, and he rubs his cheek against it, inhaling the scent through the rind. Fruit. He’d liked fruit, in the before-cage days. He wonders if it’s a foregone conclusion that he will die like this, trapped in a box -- he wonders it almost daily, but this fruit is bright enough to push all those thoughts out of his head.

He holds it in his hand and stares until it’s time to fall asleep. He props it near his cot so he can see the color when his eyes flutter open.

Arthur realizes, at some point, that Chang meant him to eat the orange. But Arthur can’t bear the thought of losing _color_ again, not a speck of vibrant life anywhere around him. Instead, he thinks about what it would taste like -- sweet and a little tart, the juice filling up his mouth and the meat being crushed by his molars. It’s almost obscene how vividly he can imagine it.

What happens is, another guard tries to take it away.

Arthur doesn’t remember the time in between being lunging at the man and standing over his fallen body, wild eyed and blinking furiously in a hallway of exposed brick, gray tiled floors. He doesn’t know what to do with himself.

He picks up the orange and wonders what country he’s in. Arthur then realizes the man on the floor is yelling for help. Arthur kicks him in the ribs and starts to walk.

What he’s looking for is a door that will lead him outside, but he has no idea which way might be out.

Arthur can’t fight three guards at once, even if two are skinny and look like hackers more than liberating soldiers. He plows into one with his shoulder anyway, rolling with a punch to his gut and trying to get out of their way.

The tallest one, white with a shock of blond hair, pulls a syringe out of his pocket. Arthur zeroes in on him, a low hum of white noise starting in his ears.

“We were just on our way to get you,” the man says and then Arthur is tackled, hitting the cold wall hard, head banging against the ground even as he flails out, hits one of the other two on the chin.

“So thanks for making this easier on us.” The needle goes into Arthur’s neck and the world fuzzes out.

+

Eames wants to be able to say he recognizes Arthur immediately, but he doesn't.

What he sees first is two of the kids from the DTL half-shoving, half-dragging something man-shaped into the cell next to his.

"Where's this one from?" he hears Yusuf yell out, first in English and then in a few other languages.

The guard snarls and tightens his grip on the back of the new captive's neck. He's blindfolded and from what Eames can see from his cell, trying incredibly hard not to panic. The man flinches at the treatment, though, and Eames can only sympathize.

"Got me in Afghanistan," the man rasps as one of the other guards opens the door to something that could be a cell next to Eames.

It's not the question Yusuf was asking, but the accent gives it away, probably as the man knew it would. Yusuf catches Eames' eye briefly, shakes his head. They're thinking the same thing -- shit, they've captured an American.

There's muffled scuffling through the stone to Eames' right, and he tries to see what's happening but can't.

It's the "Fuck off," mumbled and thick, that does it for Eames. He's heard that voice before, and knows that voice should be in Afghanistan right then. It does it for the guards, too -- they stop trying to play nice.

He hears them clamp on the manacles and winces -- the pink skin on his wrists is still in danger of splitting. He doubts that Arthur will earn the right to his hands any more easily than Eames had.

"What's your name?" Yusuf asks, and a guard slams his gun against the bars. Yusuf doesn't jump.

Arthur, and Eames knows he can’t be certain but he feels that he must be right, spits out some numbers and then makes a noise when he gets socked by the guard in his cell, a rough tumble of air.

+

Their new prisoner gets yanked from his cell immediately the next morning, leaving Eames and Yusuf alone with their new guard, who is being regarded as foe until he proves otherwise. Eames estimates he’s gone about two and a half hours before he’s  
being dragged in by the guard from the 6 pm shift -- the most muscular man the DLF appears to have on employ.

"You’ll dream for us eventually, you little shit,” he says, and Eames is sure Arthur is twisting and snarling ineffectively in his grasp, hands tied and blindfold around his eyes. “You can make this easier on yourself any time you want.”

" _You_ can suck my dick." Arthur’s voice has grown gravelly, broken. Probably screamed a lot more in his old place, and broke it again here.

The Guard 6 pm laughs as Guard 8 am to 12 pm opens the cell door, and Arthur is unceremoniously kicked into it. He lands heavily, out of Eames’ sight, but Eames can hear the slight whimper. Arthur’s injured, it sounds like, and he doubts he landed well.

"It might make things easier," Eames whispers into the tiny chink in the rock walls between them. "If you didn't fight so much."

“Fuck you too,” is the response, a beat too late and a little too pained to have much bite.

Eames doesn’t fully expect the man, who he thinks he knows, to be grateful for the advice, but he doesn’t expect him to be so hostile.

“That’s a nice way to greet an old friend,” he says, risking it to say the words a little louder. “Surely you haven’t forgotten me.”

\--

Arthur hasn’t. But Arthur's bones ache and the man who could be a friend next to him keeps whispering things at him. He wants to ignore it because has no way to verify if the man next to him is Eames, who he hasn’t seen in a year, and if it is Eames, if he can trust him.

"Why would I lie about this?" Eames is rasping at him, through the stone wall or maybe a hole. It could even be a window. His hands are still behind his back.

"Maybe if I could see you," he whispers back, and hears a noise that could be a choke or a laugh.

Then there's a cough, and more cautious words. "They left the blindfold on? Can't you break out of those cuffs?"

"Zipties, this time" Arthur says. "Circulation's not cut off yet, but. I’m in about three, seem sturdy."

"Don't want to risk it. Right then."

The whispering stops, and Arthur has to concentrate hard on his breathing, in and out, deep breaths even though his chest aches. Otherwise he wants to try to break free, struggle and writhe and wear himself down to a frantic nub.  
He has to breathe deep and force each muscle in his body to relax before he can fall asleep. What he doesn’t do is think of home.

+

They lead Arthur out of his cell the next day, still bound and blindfolded. He walks slow, shuffling, and Eames watches the proud line of his back.

"Where are you taking him?" Yusuf calls, and the guard sneers at him.

"None of your fucking business."

When both Arthur and the guard disappear beyond the last door, Eames sighs.

"They at least gave me a couple days to get used to it here. You too."

Yusuf laughs but it’s utterly joyless. "This is an American you're talking about. They probably want to break him as soon as possible."

“I can’t imagine how successful questioning him would be.”

Yusuf frowns, deep enough that Eames can see it through the bars. “I think, friend, they’ve moved straight to practical application of the PASIV.”

The news hits Eames like a punch in the gut. They could still make him dream. Dreaming, they could slice him open like a rich pomegranate, each secret ready to be harvested.

He hopes they don’t figure out how. The theories -- and Eames knew they existed, read a few papers that were meant to be classified -- were complicated. Maybe they’d be stuck on their quest to liberate the world’s secret information because if it was difficult for the research team of Arthur and Cobb, it should be impossible for his captors.

\--

Arthur wants the British man in his neighboring cell to keep talking to him. It could be Eames, he reasons with himself.

It sounds like Eames, and he wants for it to be Eames, so desperately. Arthur knows that’s where the danger lies -- he can’t wish Eames into being. Arthur wishes he could see into the other cells, wishes he could see anything except the darkness of his blindfold keeping his eyes shut.

Arthur flexes his fingers and manages to orient himself onto the cot that’s been provided. It’s better than stone and his joints ache.

“Where are we,” he finally whispers in the direction he assumes the whole in the cells are, and then there’s loud clanging from the front (he guesses) of his cell.

“No fucking talking,” says a voice, tinged with a Spanish accent, and that doesn’t help at all.

He tries to sleep.

+

Arthur is taken from the cell in the morning, though Eames is relieved to see them cut the ties around Arthur’s wrists. They lead him out of the their hall and Arthur walks stiff like he’s got an injury, flexing his hands while his jaw clenches in pain.  
Eames is shit at keeping time but Yusuf assures him it’s only been about four hours since they took him for Arthur to reappear.

"So, who wants to make sure this scum doesn't die?" A guard, named Carter, is leading Arthur by the neck, and he's walking slow, trying to keep his balance with his hands shackled in front. It’s better than zipties. Rabia is standing with a gun to the side, nudging Arthur with it every time he stumbles.

"Yusuf, it's your shit that fucked him up," Carter says and Yusuf raises his hands up in surrender, shakes his head.

"I'm not the kind of doctor who has a good bedside manner."

"Fine. Eames, get ready for a party."

"Don't take off the blindfold!" Yusuf hisses when the two DLFers leave, and Eames is too overwhelmed to question it. The person in his arms is Arthur, has to be Arthur.

The cell isn't really big enough for two, and the cot certainly isn’t. Eames puts him on the bed but Arthur looks flushed with fever, and the proximity to someone that isn’t pushing him around is both terrifying and exhilarating to Eames. He wants to hide but somehow, the fact that Arthur can’t see him like this is a comfort.

There’s dried blood on Arthur’s face, an echo of what looks to have been a terrible nosebleed. His wrists are rubbed raw from the cuffs and they’ve stripped off his shirt and shoes. He’s shivering though the cell is mild, and Eames can see the ghosts of his ribs.

“What’s wrong?” Eames asks and Arthur shakes his head and bites back what could have been a whimper. “Can you stand up?”

Arthur nods, silent again except loud, laborious breathing. He stands and looks unbalanced, but Eames tugs the thin cot mattress off it’s frame and tilts the bed so there’s more room on the floor. He lays it out so they can both sit on it, though their legs won’t be cushioned.

Eames ignores the pain in his feet, the way his ankles barely carry his weight.

He puts the one pillow he’s begged for against the stone wall and leads Arthur over, guides him into sitting down with pressure on his shoulder. Arthur instinctively curls up into his chest when they’re both sitting, and his body is trembling.

Eames doesn’t understand how Arthur can be so _okay_ with touching him. Eames was acting on instinct before but there’s a creeping panic traveling up his spine at this much contact, at the body heat, they way another body feels.

Arthur smells, to put it mildly, though at least his cotton pants seem new. Eames' fingers notched into Arthur's spine on instinct as he was thrown in the cell, and the skin was hot and alive. Eames can’t decide if he wants Arthur to leave immediately or if he wants to do it again.

“Arthur,” he says and drags his fingers through the mess of Arthur’s hair.

“I d’nt feel so good,” he says, mouthing at Eames’ shirt with each word.

“Yusuf?” Eames calls out, but there’s no answer -- there must be hostile guards outside.

"Eames?" Arthur mumbles and shifts, half sitting, slumping against the back wall. "C'n I look at you? Is it really you?"

Eames is sure he doesn't smell particularly well either. "Arthur, I can't. Yusuf said I couldn’t, and it’s probably his concoction that has you all buggered up."

“I’m awake,” Arthur says and it doesn’t sound like a question, but. All Eames can do is wrap an arm around his shoulders and pull him closer. He tugs the blanket from his cot around them.

"Yer warm," Arthur says, and Eames sighs and wonders if he should just snap Arthur's neck, if it would be more merciful then letting this go on.

+

When Eames wakes up, Arthur has commandeered the entire blanket, scratchy and wool and warm. He’s still curled up, head resting on Eames’ thigh. Arthur isn't shivering, and he snores just a little on every exhale.

Each passing hour feels like a day. Eames gets used to the full body tremors that run through Arthur every five minutes or so. Arthur can’t stop leaning against him, pressing them together, and his hands open and close in the cuffs like startled birds every time a spasm runs through his spine.

Arthur breathes hot at his skin, and Eames doesn't know what to do with him. They're propped up against the back wall of the cell, and the fear of proximity has ebbed into something duller for Eames. His fingers itch with the need to touch Arthur -- god, how long has it been since he's been this close to anyone not a guard, since he's had this much skin under his hands.

"The blindfold has to stay on," says Yusuf as Grace brings them breakfast, gives Eames water and a rag to “make sure the American doesn’t fucking die.”

"The drug makes his eyes sensitive to light. Makes him sensitive to everything, really." Eames can tell from the way Arthur moves every time Eames touches him more than he needs to, the way his skin breaks out into goosebumps.

"It's the same family of compound as the one he was on when he was brought here -- the sedative is very powerful but this reaction is pretty common. I didn’t intend to use it. He might not remember much of today or yesterday, but it should wear off soon."

Eames tips water into Arthur’s mouth and tries to wipe off the blood. He succeeds in smearing it around Arthur’s face and Arthur just licks at his fingers.

“Thirsty,” he says and Eames doesn’t know what to do. It’s too much touching -- too intimate, even though he can almost feel Arthur’s pulse due to the closeness of their bodies.

"Don't mind me, mate," Yusuf says and maybe winks, maybe doesn't, and covers himself with a blanket. Because Yusuf has more than one blanket, sometimes gets coffee, and Eames just gets Arthur, mostly naked and shivering with some kind of drug-induced fever.

"Eames," he pants, and his breath is sour and hot against his skin.

"Finally believe it's me then, love?" he asks and Arthur shakes again, coughing. His hands turn to fists.

Arthur's breathing evens out while Eames runs his hands through his hair, rubs soft circles against his naked back. His fingers finally slip over the bones of Arthur's spine, familiar, and he ignores the aches in his own joints, the way Arthur's weight puts his leg to sleep and the way the stone of the cell wall digs into his back despite the pillow.

Yusuf wakes first, because it's impossible to sleep more than a few fitful hours at a time in this place. The shifting wakes Eames up and he tries desperately to not jostle Arthur now that he's asleep and compliant, not driving him crazy.  
They all wait.

+

Eames doesn’t get called in for testing again, and Arthur is removed from his cell and deposited back into his own. He can hear Arthur shift his cot to the wall, can hear Arthur whisper the words “Thank you” through the hole in the stone.

Other than that, though, Arthur doesn’t say much. Yusuf and Eames trade stories about their childhoods -- Eames thinks about his a lot in the hours they have to stay silent in, recreating days when he ran outside and played with his siblings. Tries to capture exactly how one picnic looked, how a day at the beach felt.

“What did you do when you were a boy, Arthur?” Yusuf asks, and there’s a small stirring in the cell.

“Not a lot. ROTC in high school. Played cello in the orchestra. Didn’t get into much trouble.”

“Boring,” Yusuf scoffs, and then all conversation stops because it’s time for the guards to change. Conversation they have to ration out, like extra bottles of water, candle stubs, and magazines that Grace or Charles, the weekend night guard, sneak them.

+

The second time Arthur comes back delirious with bad Somnacin, Eames is asleep and Arthur’s hands are untied.

Eames startles when his cell door is opened and again when Arthur is shoved on top of him in his cot. The door clangs shut and neither moves for what feels likes a long time, Arthur panting. He’s not shivering this time.

It's sticky and Arthur's-- he's not heavy, but it's hard for Eames to breathe under him. Eames has to start pushing him off.

"Please don't go," Arthur says, and he sounds desperate. Eames realizes that Arthur's hands are clutching his biceps, and Arthur starts moving them, mapping Eames out.

"Hey, shh," Eames says, and makes sure to keep both hands on Arthur's body as he shifts him to his side.

Arthur stays curled up on Eames' chest and Eames looks down at his leg, wincing and wondering if he has the energy to move them to the floor again.

"It's so dark there," Arthur says. “I don’t like the dreams they want me to build.”

It’s dark in the cell, too, and Eames has to feel the side of Arthur’s face to confirm that the blindfold is still there.

Eames shifts to give him more room, moves the blanket so it covers them both. Arthur’s shirt has spatters of blood -- another nosebleed -- and his skin feels clammy and hot.  
“Do you build for them?” Eames whispers and Arthur shakes his head violently.

“No, no, no,” Arthur says, repeating it until Eames presses a finger against his lips.

He catches Yusuf's eye, glinting in the dim light, and Yusuf is frowning, staring at them.

"What do you want?" Eames hisses, wary, but the guard is most likely asleep.

"Just. I'll tell them not to use it again too soon. The sensory deprivation is getting to him, even when they put him in your cell."

Eames looks down at Arthur. He's the most interesting thing Eames has seen in about four months, because he's new, because his body could be lovely if it weren't so bruised and dirt smudged. Eames wants to protect him now, doesn’t feel any desire to recoil and stay alone.

He wonders how long he has and runs his hand through Arthur's hair again.

+

Eames is startled awake in the dark by the sounds of Arthur coughing, retching really. His lips are dark, and his chin is bloody, and Eames watches him spit a giant clot of blood onto the concrete floor.

“Oh Jesus,” Eames says, sitting up and grabbing at Arthur, who is sitting on the edge of the bed.

“It’s nothing,” Arthur pants, and keeps coughing. “Nosebleed while sleeping.” His voice is rough and Eames can’t decide if he should believe him or not. There’s blood smearing in the gaps of Arthur’s teeth, in the cracks of his bottom lip.

\--

Morning is delineated by the lights being turned on in the main hallway of cells, and Eames feels sick when he looks at Arthur, who is breathing open mouthed into the mattress. His face is smeared with blood, and while Eames knows it isn’t serious, it’s hard not to feel panicky.

Their morning guard is one that doesn’t like talking -- to them or from them. But even he startles when he sees Arthur, blood on his chin.

“Can we get something to clean him up?” Eames asks and the guard scowls.

Yusuf chimes in. "Give him a blanket or a jacket if you don't want him to get worse. You also need to give them both more water rations. He's going to need to stay in that cell for a few days, unless you're going to keep a twenty four hour watch on him."

The guard shifts uncomfortably. This isn't one that likes to hit, Eames remembers. His face is round, still tinged with baby fat.

"Unless you want to kill your one American hostage," finishes Yusuf, who looks a little smug.

The guard doesn’t.

Eames wonders which of the guards lost his jacket to the cause, and he wraps Arthur up in the blanket when shower detail, two angry and silent women, come by to take him to lock him up and take him to the bathroom. They snap cuffs on him before walking him out.

Arthur’s hair is cold and damp and his skin is clammy when he's shoved back into the cell, and only after the door is locked do they unshackle his hands through the bars. Arthur's feverish heat is almost welcome, and Arthur at least doesn’t look like his face has been beaten in.

He smiles hazily when Eames sits him down on the cot mattress, moved down to the floor.

“Thanks,” he says, “but I’m fine, okay? Don’t worry.”

"Cheers, mate," Eames says when he looks up, notices Yusuf watching them.

“What?”

"I fucked up." Yusuf looks down, away from Eames’ cell. "I didn't think they'd use the untested formulas like this. I thought they’d want to build the dreams themselves. I wouldn’t have explained so much if -- but he wasn't even here when I arrived. I didn’t even know they had other prisoners."

"Is he going to get past it?"

Yusuf nods. “Of course. It’s not permanent, though he might need glasses if he didn’t before.”

“That’s reassuring,” Arthur says, voice low and dry and the sarcasm is shatteringly familiar. Eames runs fingers through his damp hair without looking and Arthur shifts into the touch.

“Well. I am an experimental chemist.”

“I’d gathered,” Arthur says, and finally the guard yells at them to shut the fuck up.

+

The proximity gets less overwhelming, in increments, for Eames, until his heart wrenches when Arthur is put away in his own cell.

He wonders if being alone is better or worse for Arthur -- alone, he gets to see sometimes, but never anyone but the guards. His cell door isn’t angled to let him glimpse either Eames or Yusuf, just the door that leads out into some sort of complex that’s been commandeered by the Data Liberation Front.

+

Arthur is taken away at seemingly random intervals, but only sometimes is he shoved roughly into Eames’ cell, blindfold on.

Yusuf promises that not all the blends of Somnacin that he’s made for their captors will lead to fevers and nosebleeds and delirium, but there’s really no way to tell which bottle will produce which result at this point.

Eames appreciates the blankets that he’s given, and he keeps them for the night when the weather shifts to winter. They’re not given any better clothes, and Arthur clings to the jacket he was given with white-knuckled fingers.

Sometimes the side-effects are mild -- loss of appetite, dizziness, a need to sleep for fourteen hours. Other times they’re worse: the nosebleeds, the light sensitivity, a persistent and maddening ringing in his ears that makes him grab onto Eames and hum to himself.

The worst part is the sickening relief that Eames feels every time it’s not _him_ being dragged out of his cell. That Eames can stay, lie back in his cot, dream of being thirteen and riding horses through the countryside.

\--

"I think they tried to get me to make a video for them," Arthur says to the hole in the wall when he returns. He’s been gone for three meals, and Eames was starting to feel anxious.

From what Eames could see, though, Arthur’s skin looked clean when they'd brought him back, his hair trimmed, beard shaved. They'd even hosed out his cell while he'd been gone. He did appear, however, to be sporting a new and darkening bruise around his eye and split lip.

"That doesn't sound like a project you'd be interested in pursuing, does it?"

Arthur lets out an annoyed growl. "Shut the fuck up for a second. I...I thought it was a dream."

It's an old argument, but not one they've ever had in this direction. They'd scuffle over mistaking dreams for reality, not reality for dreams. Eames can’t dwell on memories that recent.

“I don’t know. I thought I could tell, but this one was sharper.”

Yusuf coughs from across the hall. “Ah. I was hoping they wouldn’t get to that stuff.”

“What stuff?” Arthur asks but there’s a loud bang against the cell bars -- butt of the guard’s (8 pm to midnight, named Luntz) rifle.

Yusuf looks at Eames and signs at him, a few crude gestures that he and Eames had worked out a few weeks into their mutual captivity. “Dangerous,” Yusuf says with his hands. “Dangerous.”

+

The guards change out at midnight, waking them all up from fitful sleeps.

"I want a shower, too," Yusuf yells, because he’d noticed that Arthur had his beard shaved, and Guard #6 (no name, indistinct ethnic background, silent) swings around and aims a gun at him. Yusuf doesn't flinch at that.

"You wanna be the one testing out your compounds? We could probably use another guinea pig," he says, and that’s the first time Guard #6 has spoken to them. It isn’t couched in an apologetic tone, nor does it seem overly hostile. It’s just a statement.

It’s probably true.

Yusuf is quiet for a long moment, and Guard #6 settles near the main door to their cells’ hallway, reading a book.

Arthur's shivering again -- Eames can hear it through the wall, the chattering of his teeth.

+

Yusuf gets a shower and has his beard trimmed the next day when he’s taken out for ablutions. Eames doesn’t, because his infrequent trips to the shower and daily trips to the lavatory always take about twice as long as they do for the other two prisoners.

It’s the only time Arthur even gets a hope of seeing Eames, of confirming, but he is always marched out with a towel over his face -- they all are, because while the guards are no longer anonymous, there are members of the Liberation Front that keep hidden. Arthur worries that his feet will never heal, that the DLF has broken every little bone in Eames’ feet and not helped any of them knit back together.

Despite the weakness caused by bad Somnacin, Arthur moves much better than Eames, who's still only able to put tiny bits of weight on his feet. Arthur isn’t sure how to ask him about it, if there’s a way to do it without making Eames feel more fragile.

#

It's not as though Mal hasn't watched the news. She can't escape it, really -- Cobb keeps the television on at a low hum as he putters around the house in the evenings, when he's not on assignment. When the names are released, Cobb spends the day with Phillipa, walking her around the park in the evening as Mal puts dishes in the dishwasher and takes the recycling out. The names of the prisoners have been released, and she knows Cobb knew them, knows some of the men who have been captured.

There're a few photos that accompany the news report, and she knows the face of the American. Lieutenant Arthur is how he's identified in the paperwork -- she's working with a few platoon-mates now. He was presumed dead, for a time, until a grainy video of him punching someone in the face and then being tackled to the ground was released as proof that he was alive.

Cobb comes home as the video plays behind an anchorwoman, the footage poor.

“You wrote those papers with him, didn’t you?”

Dom is holding Phillipa, their daughter, close to his chest. Her breathing is loud enough that Mal can hear it, understand why Dom would be soothed by it.

“Yeah. He’s...he’s a good kid. Has a lot of talent.”

She can’t help but frown, a little. Dom Cobb was a prodigy, and the thought of him cultivating other young geniuses outside of a university, of sending them into a war zone, is troubling at best.

\--

The routine is surprisingly comforting -- they give Arthur around five days to rest before he’s thrown into a dream and then back into Eames’ cell.

Eames runs his thumb along Arthur’s jawline. That, at least, is a familiar touch, and Arthur starts to relax a little.

“How do you keep so clean-shaven then?” Eames whispers, and Arthur smiles a little from where he’s resting against Eames’ thigh.

“I asked one of the guards. Guy lent me his razor the next day.”

“They talk to you?” Eames asks. He sounds genuinely surprised, like it hadn’t occurred to him to try.

Arthur shrugs against him, shivering a little. This batch made him twitchy but he’s more alert than usual.

“They’re,” Arthur says, then pauses. “They’re not all terrible, you know.”

There’s a pause, like Eames doesn’t know what to say. Arthur wishes he could see Eames’ face; the silences are so difficult to read. But he hasn’t seen Eames’ face in over a year.

“Grace, for instance,” he says, and sighs, maybe conceding a point.

“She’s a mercenary,” is what Eames finally says. “Just because she doesn’t give a shit about their cause doesn’t mean she’s a good person, Arthur. You can’t tell me they didn’t. That they _aren’t_ torturing you right now.”

Arthur bites his lip and doesn’t want to talk anymore, but he can feel the expectation hanging in the air.

“Some of them,” he says, even more hushed than usual. “view it as...retaliatory. Justice, even.”

“Fuck that,” Eames says. “Sod the lot of them, alright? They can justify it all they like, couch it in freedom of speech. We can’t even talk when we’d like.”

Arthur isn’t sure what to say to that. Eames knows, by now, the gist of what the PASIV could really do. It wasn’t just about beating the fear of death out of soldiers, or letting them train in a way they’d never been able to before. It was a weapon.

“I think it’d be better if I didn’t know what they wanted.” Arthur says after a long pause.

“Feeling conflicted?” Eames asks and Arthur can see the sneer, see the man who Eames was so clearly. He doesn’t want that face on whatever this new Eames is, condescending and cold sometimes instead of curious.

“No,” is what Arthur says, because it’s not really a regret or a qualm. But he understands why Grace would be a mercenary. Why some of the hackers are here. Why Rabia would be angry. He’s not sure he would have gotten through his first months of captivity without a little doubt in the righteousness of his mission and that’s really where the conflict is, churning in his gut.

“I know you’re full of national pride, Arthur, and hate to see the Yanks smear their good name, but America hasn’t tortured folks from half of the countries that make up this little Benetton ad of a terrorist movement.” Eames says. “It’s a joke. If it wasn’t for us I’m sure this shithole would have been blown up.”

Arthur doesn’t want to talk any more, so he doesn’t, and waits until Eames obligingly starts carding fingers against his scalp. Soothing.

+

When Arthur is not in his cell, most of Eames’ thoughts are jumbled. Vivid memories sometimes will consume an entire afternoon and he’ll blink at the end, only seeing the ceiling for the first time that day.

Other days are less exciting, however. When Arthur is returned to his own cell, the number one thought that consumes Eames is how much his feet ache. It's not news -- they hurt every day, ever since the first time they were hit over and over, with a stick, with cable.

He thinks, at least it's tangible, and at least they leave him alone now. His feet are healing, he thinks, though he’s pretty sure they are healing wrong. He can feel it in the way the pain travels up his nerves -- pain in places that never used to have bones. Those places feel brittle now.

This is what he thinks about the next day when Arthur is gone. The feeling ebbs and flows, a tide of a dull ache giving way to a wave crash of agony. He flexes his toes and almost whimpers.

“Something new starts tomorrow,” Grace says bluntly, shaking him out of it. She drops Eames’ breakfast on the ground. “Gather your strength today.”

The panic starts then. Eames doesn’t want to leave his cell -- he knows this desire is absurd as soon as it washes over him, but what if he’s trapped somewhere else, somewhere unfamiliar?

He hears Grace say something to Arthur but doesn’t hear what, can’t hear the reaction, and he wants to pace his cell but he can’t. Hours pass in silence and Eames feels the pain in his feet throb in time with his nervous heart.

“It’s okay,” he hears, after their lunch is brought to them. “We’ll be okay,” Arthur says, voice a comforting rumble at the hole in their walls.

“You think they’ll take us together?” Eames asks even though the entire question exists only in an abstract form, practically meaningless. It doesn’t matter what either of them think.

“They’d better,” Arthur says.

Eames wants to keep talking -- he can recognize when Arthur’s finished grunting out seven word sentences, though, and Arthur’s done for the night. He’s cautious with how much he pushes Arthur to speak to him, to reassure him, even though some days Eames wants to shackle him to his bed frame and keep him there forever. Some days Eames wants to wring the words out of him; the ache in his chest makes him want to make Arthur hurt in kind, to knit them together like that.

He wouldn’t though. He would never.

+

‘Something new’ starts with being handed a new towel. Eames is instructed to put it over his face so he won’t see any of the intricate workings of the DLF’s base, he’s sure, but it seems cleaner that most of the things he has so he doesn’t complain.

He assumes Arthur is blindfolded again -- their shoulders bump when Eames is walked out of his cell and in front of Arthur’s. They’re told to walk, and Eames feels something dig into his back. If he looks down, he can see his feet, so he focuses on those.

Eames wishes he could steady Arthur but walking hurts, seems like it will hurt forever. Arthur bumps into walls behind him, and while it sounds like he's limping but it's still more efficient than how Eames walks, having to take a break every few steps.

They both get pushed through the new door at the same time, stumbling into each other, and a dim light is switched on, a low buzz filling the room.

"You can look once the door is closed," their guard says, and then it slams shut. Eames can hear the lock, several locks, being thrown, and he shakes the towel off his face, catching it in his hands.

There’s a bench to his right and he sits down gracelessly, and then looks up. Arthur has his thumbs hooked under the blindfold. He pulls it off and Eames’ heart lurches and can’t decide to be overjoyed or horrified by how pale his usually olive skin is, how stark the circles under his eyes are.

Eames smiles, finally, and Arthur smiles back.

\--  
Arthur can’t stop blinking. The room they’re in is fucking cramped, but there’s Eames, still intact, not dead or tortured or drugged.

It's the first time Arthur's been able to look at Eames, to see him without the masking effect of Somnacin. Arthur looks at him and his eyes are wild, pupils enormous, and he can't stop blinking.

"Hey," Eames says, voice gruff. "C'mere." He’s smiling and the crooked teeth are such a relief to finally see. It’s a double edged sword though, because the relief comes with a rush of utter exhaustion, as though his body can’t process that many feelings and walking in the same day.

Arthur doesn't say anything as he sinks down, just rests his head on Eames' chest and breathes in.

“Eames,” he says, quiet and reverent as he reaches out and touches Eames’ face. His beard is shaved unevenly, but his eyes are a familiar grey.

They’re the most familiar thing about him, though, because Eames looks like shit. In Arthur’s mind, he was still the man he’d met at training, fit and broad in the shoulders. Now Arthur can see he’s thin, gaunt faced, muscle lost to months of  
inactivity.

It doesn’t matter, though. Arthur’s greedy with the want to touch him everywhere, from the sweep of his brow to the arch of his ruined feet.

He settles for curling around Eames, pressing them together as much as he can. Arthur likes the feeling of Eames' weight over him, the way he’ll hold him protectively as they sleep. He wonders if this should be emasculating but doesn’t quite give a fuck. It’s soothing after weeks -- months? -- spent in isolation, when even the guards wouldn’t speak to him for more than a sentence and he thought he would die alone.

Eames looks down at him as the silence moves from reverent to strange.

“Still like what you see, love?” he asks, voice quiet and Arthur can’t even muster the will to laugh.

He shakes his head. “I like it. I like you, okay? I’m just happy to see you, any you, and when we get out --.”

Arthur stops short because it’s the first time, the very first time, he’s voiced a thought about the future. He knows Eames and Yusuf spend their time in the past, walking through a maze of confused childhood memories, but Arthur spends as much time thinking about all the things he’ll be able to do when he leaves.

Eames frowns, and it’s startling how much feeling that expression stirs in Arthur. To see Eames do anything is almost overwhelming, so Arthur closes his eyes, smiles, and when he opens them Eames is smiling back at him.

“Okay, Arthur,” he says and squeezes Arthur’s hand.

\--

Rabia shows up, directing Guard #6 to aim a gun unerringly at Arthur as two other DLFers drag in chairs and a table. She’s smart, Eames thinks, because Eames is still ready to fight but not if it puts Arthur in danger.

They’re shackled down to the chairs and Yusuf’s battered PASIV is placed on the table as Rabia watches.

“We’re ready,” she says once the restraints are checked, and Yusuf looks incredibly uncomfortable when he’s marched in by Guard Luntz.

“This is a bad experiment. I’m just reiterating so everyone here knows that I’ve voiced my objections.”

“Shut up and get the machine ready. You’ve given him worse things, right?” Rabia snaps, pointing at Arthur.

Yusuf coughs, ignoring the question entirely. “On the plus side this won’t make any of you blind. Those side effects should be completely nullified. But I don’t think this machine is made to handle more than two dreamers at once.”

“We’ll have to find out, won’t we?” she asks and she proffers her arm. “Come on, doctor.”

She looks at Arthur as Yusuf sets up the PASIV lines. “Don’t fuck it up, and don’t try anything clever.”

Arthur swallows, mouth dry. Yusuf is still frowning as he puts them to sleep.

\--

Arthur opens his eyes in a desert. It’s not someplace nice -- it’s battle scenario 186K, an obstacle course of sand dunes and plants. He wonders whose subconscious he’ll meet, if the other two are even in the dream with him at all. Yusuf had looked supremely dubious about the success of them all entering the dream together, and sure enough, Arthur is alone.

He shifts his pack and then looks down at himself. His injured leg isn’t buckling and he feels more...solid. He bends his arm and feels his muscles flex, muscles that aren’t nearly as strong in the real world. Dogtags press against his breastbone.

He starts walking, because he doesn’t have much else to do. He thinks he might see a building in the distance.

+

Eames wakes up in a church. He’s laying on a pew, and his back aches a little. It’s a fake history invented by the dream, but Eames likes it best when he has a sense of normalcy when he’s under.

Unfortunately, the church doesn’t afford him much. It’s smeared around the edges, lacking in detail like a crude sketch. It’s a church that looks like it was built by someone who’s never actually been inside of one. Indistinct figures move around the stained glass windows, casting rustling shadows across the floor.

He yawns, and stretches. Rabia is nowhere to be found, which is a plus. But Arthur is also missing, which makes him both lonely and edgy.

There’s only one door, so there’s not much to explore inside. He swings it open to peek outside.

It’s an empty expanse of sand, wind whipping through it hard enough that his eyes sting from just a few seconds of exposure. He wonders if dreaming himself some goggles would be worthwhile, but decides maybe staying put would be safer.

There’s no crucifix on the altar, he notes, and while there are Bibles in the pews the insides are just filled with smeared memories of text with some pages of stark and crisp Hebrew.

There’s a knock and the door swings open, and there Arthur is -- the Arthur Eames first met, not the Arthur he’s shackled next to in the waking life.

“Eames?” Arthur says, his brows furrowing. Eames realizes he’s holding a gun, a standard issue M-16.

“Arthur!” Eames smiles, because Arthur looks good. Tanned, muscled. Eames looks down at himself and feels underdressed in a body that’s mostly skin and bones. “You found me.”

“We should have woken up in the same place,” Arthur says, because he’d willed it like that. He stalks around the perimeter of the church -- it’s Cobb’s, of course, but it’s a poor facsimile of Cobb’s careful architecture.

“Well, we’re together now. And no terrorists in sight.”

Arthur reaches Eames’ pew and stares at him, gaze intense. He’s not aiming his weapon but he might as well be.

“How do I know I didn’t bring you here with me?” Arthur snarls and that accusation hurts and doesn’t make sense at all.

“What are you talking about?” Eames stands up and stalks toward Arthur, concentrating and letting himself fill out. He thinks of what it felt like to be powerful, back when they first met, and Arthur blinks and takes a step back.

“I...you could just be. You could just be a projection.”

Eames reaches out and grabs his wrist, pulling Arthur toward him. He runs a thumb over the thin skin of his wrist, feels the heat of Arthur’s veins.

“Arthur. You don’t even have normal projections. Why would you have one that’s me?”

He looks disoriented for a minute and then looks down at where they’re touching, and shrugs.

“I guess you wouldn’t be hostile either way. Okay.”

Eames kisses his wrist and that’s a type of touch they haven’t indulged in since captivity. Arthur startles, eyes wide.

“Okay, Eames, I get it. I. We should fortify this place because Rabia’s projections are fucking mean,” he says and Eames drops his hand and nods.

Her projections are also smart, and lead her straight to them in a matter of about two hours, even with Arthur trying to keep a maze of some kind around them.

Rabia grins widely when she throws open the doors to the church, and Eames turns to shoot her out of the dream before she can get in. They’ve found secrets stuck to the wall, scraps of paper from all three minds dreaming together tacked above candles  
and surrounded by little metal milagros. It’s a straight bit of Catholic imagery but Eames doesn’t question it, just sets out to read what he can about DLF.

Eames doesn’t shoot because Arthur jerks around from where he’s sitting and reading, and he collapses the church around them.

Rabia leaves them in that new room and makes sure it’s dark when she leaves. There’s no real guess as to how long they stay there, but it’s long enough to get ravenous and parches. Arthur curls around him, though, and whispers, “Worth it. So worth it,” when Eames asks about regrets.

#

“They’re going to try to get those kids out of there with trade embargoes,” Cobb says as he walks through the door. Mal holds Phillipa up to him and he kisses her cheek, but he isn’t going to be deterred.

“Trade embargoes and diplomatic negotiations. If we know approximately where the DLF’s base is, we should just bomb around until we hit them.”

“Dom,” she says, and his shoulders slump.

“I don’t mean that.”

“You don’t mean that. Trade embargoes are radical enough.”

He looks miserable, still, slumping into an armchair. “It’s been such a long time, Mal. How could the military, how could anyone let it go on this long?”

“I don’t know, dear, but I think they’ll be out soon, yes? The PASIV blueprints have already leaked, all we’re trading is some proper Somnacin and a mechanical upgrade.” They both know this information, were in fact both consulted on what to trade and what needed to stay secret.

“And then what, Mal? How do you fight something like this?”

She looks at him, and Phillipa is quiet too. “Dom,” she says. “It was never going to be unbeatable forever.”

“I know. I just. I thought we were the good guys this time.”

Mal bites her lip and doesn’t know what to say to that.

\--

The dreaming stops. Arthur figures they ran out of Somnacin that seemed safe to test.

Eames thinks they’ve somehow cracked how to build a dream without Arthur’s help.

They fight about it, because the cell has enough space for that now. It passes the time -- before, for Arthur, just listening to Eames breathing would be enough of a distraction. Ironically, now that he can see he’s bored with everything around them.

He saves bottle caps from their water and makes a checker board with it and dust. It’s immediately confiscated, in the middle of a game, by a guard he doesn’t recognize and Arthur wants to scream. He tries exercising again and Eames gets antsy, snappy.

Arthur worries because Eames doesn’t appear to be getting less fatigued even though they’re in a nicer cell. He coughs now, rattling, and doesn’t ever want to eat.

Grace isn’t their guard anymore, and it feels like they’re trapped in dual isolation for months. Eames is keeping track, though, and on day nine the door swings wide open and Yusuf is shoved inside.

“Hey,” he says nervously, and then he smiles. “God, I can’t believe I’ve missed you two.”

“It’s mutual,” Eames says, smiling, and Yusuf settles on the floor.

“What’re you joining us for? We’re not all being forced to dream together somehow, are we?” Arthur’s worried, though it’s true seeing Yusuf alive and well is a relief.

“Someone is negotiating with the DLF. From what Grace has been able to pass to me, their supply lines are getting cut off. As a sign of good faith they’ve been asked to let one prisoner go before the final exchange takes place.”

“That explains the drop in food quality,” Arthur says, and Yusuf nods.

“And why you haven’t been put under in a while -- there’s no secure way to get more Somnacin ingredients.”

Arthur looks at Eames, serious. "You've got to be the first to go home."

Eames shakes his head. His face is sweaty and he's wrapped in both his and Arthur's blanket.

Yusuf shrugs. "He's right, as loathe as I am to admit it. You've probably got pneumonia or something, and your feet are pretty fucked up."

"I'm not going to leave just because you think I'm some delicate flower."

Arthur's eyes narrow at that. "Eames, I'd rather you not die because you want to be some kind of self-sacrificing asshole."

“Arthur and I are both robust enough to take a few more weeks” -- and god, the thought of a few more weeks here without Eames makes Arthur’s stomach drop -- “but this scene change has not done you well.”

Eames shakes his head and coughs and doesn’t argue when he’s outvoted.

+

Guard #6 turns out to be his escort, and Eames shuffles out, doesn’t whimper. It’s the first time he’s seen some of the rooms and hallways of the compound, the ad-hoc computer stations and the wide eyes of his captors. Most look uncomfortable, won’t meet his eyes, as he’s led up a ladder and walked into a van.

He's put on a stretcher almost immediately and rolled onto a plane, and the fever hurts him more there. The blankets are softer and people keep trying to talk to him until he passes out.

#

The week after the American held hostage by the Data Liberation Front is released, Mal gets a classified portfolio and a new patient.

Arthur was supposed to have died in an IED explosion. His platoon described it as the brightest light they'd ever seen, like a flashbulb snapping off right before it dies. Mal reads the notes over and over as she preps for her patient’s arrival.

The firefight was louder than they expected, and so hectic. The orders were fast, though, and they'd run enough drills to move on instinct once the bomb exploded.

Arthur, she has read, doesn't talk about it.

He doesn't talk about anything at all.

+

When Eames wakes up in a hospital, stripped and sponged clean, he first thinks about the warm weight of Arthur.

It's replaced almost all other sense memories -- food smells strong and unfamiliar, sheets feel incredibly comforting and restrictive, depending on how panicky he's feeling that day. But they don't feel normal.

The feeling of Arthur's spine under his knuckles, though. In the morning, Arthur's breathing sounds in his ear, and it makes the struggle to wakefulness more difficult. When his eyes open he's always alone, the quietly beeping machines surrounding him and not much else.

He's in a private room, because he's waiting for surgery on the tiny bones in his feet that have fused together wrong. Arthur was right about the developing pneumonia as well -- he breathes in wheezes and imagines the feeling of weight on his chest is survivor's guilt.

They bring him a therapist but he has no idea what to say about wherever he was. He does a debrief and isn't sure what to write, can barely hold a pencil. His handwriting spiders all over the page until they finally find him a laptop. Typing is easier, less fine motor skills, but looking at a screen makes his eyes ache.

"It's okay," the agent they've sent with the paperwork says, "you can take your time with this."

"How's Ar--" Eames cuts himself off though. "How are the negotiations going?"

The agent doesn't meet his eyes, but Eames is getting used to that. "The Americans will take care of their own, don't you worry about that."

“I'm not," Eames says sharply. "I'm not worried."

#

Mal doesn't like it when people come to her office in the VA hospital without making an appointment. It unnerves her and throws the balance off for the rest of the day.

“May I help you, Major?” she asks, looking up over her reading glasses. She doesn’t bother hiding the annoyance in her voice.

“I just came by to drop off some specifics about your new patient, the lieutenant.”

She frowns, eyes narrowing. “What, are these orders? I haven’t even been able to meet with him yet. In fact, I’m pretty sure I won’t for a few days yet since he’s due for surgery on his leg and will be recovering from that.”  
He shrugs and doesn’t look put off. "You’re expected to handle him as ordered, ma’am. His training cost us too much fucking money to lose, and you're the only one with the capabilities to handle these cases anyway."

Mal starts to say, "My husband-," but she's cut off.

"The only one who isn't going to be _emotionally compromised_ ," he snaps.

Mal glares, because what the hell does he know about that.

She has Arthur’s file on her desk and flips through it again.

#

"I'm Dr. Mal Cobb," she says, and the young man in the hospital bed blinks at her. He takes her hand and his grip is sure and strong.

She sees the strain in his eyes at the exertion.

She smiles and hopes it looks encouraging.

He folds his hands politely in his lap and watches her. His face is blank, but she knows he's responsive, reads, will shake his head yes or no when he's asked direct questions.

"I've heard you're not very talkative," she says, jumping in. "I'm here to help you, Arthur."

He blinks at her slowly. The cuts on his face are fading, really, but she still thinks it's too early for her to be there. He should be sleeping, curled up at home with his family.

The light in his room is very dim and she has to stop herself from opening the windows and letting the sun in.

He's not ready for that kind of stimulation yet, they told her. Something about his eyes.

\--

Arthur isn’t sure what to think of Dom Cobb’s wife. She’s lovely, and soothing, but he doesn’t feel compelled to talk to her or anyone else he’s met so far. He was rushed into surgery a few days after arriving at the veteran’s hospital, and he’s still not totally sure what state he’s in.

He had an on-call psychologist for the first week, in case he felt violent or had thoughts of “suicidal ideation.” He also had a roommate, went through a couple of them, and that made him feel the most uneasy. Eventually Arthur was given his own room, with a dimmer switch and a bed that moved him around, and that felt okay.

The second Dr. Cobb seems like she will be nice and seems less detached then the rest of the people who expect him to talk to them. Arthur thinks it might be most efficient to save his words for her -- he doesn’t feel like he has enough left in his lungs to do a full debrief with his commanding officers. Mal works for the government so he could clear her to pass along the recaps.

He’s not sure how useful that will be, though. He’s given a tablet computer to entertain himself and, while he knows he shouldn’t, he Googles himself immediately.

Thousands of articles pop up. He knows intellectually that anger isn’t the right response but he is, he’s furious.

There are pictures of him that he has no recollection of -- pictures of him getting off the plane to land in US soil, a few grainy shops of him leaving the DLF headquarters, waving in front of the hospital.

It’s a panic, the feeling of bile raising in his throat, that he had no idea that all these photographers were shooting right at him, that no one thought to hide him.

#

The first time Mal hears Arthur speak, he says _Fuck._

He's fallen at the walking bars in physio again, and he's sitting in a heap on the ground. It's not that he can't walk, it's that he can't walk correctly -- gait uneven, limping and slow. Months of favoring his bad leg has hurt the alignment of his good one

Mal watches as he tries to pull himself back to his feet and sees the therapist watching, not trying to help.

The PT, Rhonda, catches her eye and shrugs. "Sometimes," she says, "a little tough love is good for them."

Arthur doesn't make it back up and slumps against the floor, shoulders a defeated line to match the pinch of his mouth.

"Fuck," he says again. "Fuck this."

He gets himself to his feet on the second try and shuffles out of the apparatus, done with proper walking, stumbling the few steps to the door. Shambles, mostly limps.

Rhonda leans back in her chair and stretches, looks at Mal again. "Just wait," she says, "no one ever makes it out of here."

There's a muffled scream and thumping beyond the doors of the light grey gym.

His physical therapist is in her 60s, a slim and muscled black woman with knees covered in scars as a result of Gulf War I.

"You need to get a hold of yourself, Marine!" Rhonda barks, her hand firm around the back of his neck. He's on his knees and the two guards are sprawled out, nursing the impact points of hits to the face.

"You're getting stronger," she tells him. "Knocked 'em out cold."

Arthur just stares at the floor. Mal watches his nostrils flare, the way each movement he makes is broadcast all over his body.

"You'll be able to walk out of here soon enough," Rhonda says.

+

Therapy sessions don’t go well because Eames can’t trust anyone, not really. He barely trusts that he’s in this hospital room, that he’s not asleep.

When his mum comes to visit it’s a disaster because she can’t stop crying and it takes him a shade too long to recognize that she’s real, that he isn’t playing out an elaborate fantasy in his head.

He tries to explain these things to his doctors but they’ve never been in a dreamscape. They’ve never died, over and over, woken up.

When Eames ran out of memories he wanted to revisit, he started building new ones, for different people he thought he might have been, at some point. Full lives. He’s never been good at plot, but backstory, that he’s good at.

Each one is a forge, and he introduces each one to a different doctor. It’s the closest he’s gotten to a real dream since he’s woken up.

#

"You're seeing Dr. Bala in a few days, to discuss any follow up surgeries," Mal says as she flips through the paper planner she keeps with her patients' minutia written in it. It's more secure in a small binder than it is on a cloud calendar, anyway, and Arthur's more classified than most.

"Good," he says. "He's the only doctor I like around this place."

She almost snorts, incredulous. She's never met a surgeon with a worse bedside manner, and that's saying something, since she's never met a surgeon with a good bedside manner.

Instead, she decides to go ahead and get it off her chest now. "Do you have a problem with women?" Mal asks. "I could recommend a doctor you might feel more comfortable with, if that's your issue with our sessions."

It's in her blandest, most neutral voice and Arthur looks at her, forehead wrinkling in confusion. "Oh," he says, and then he laughs. It sounds like dust being blown off of a bookshelf, filthy with disuse. "I have other doctors besides you, you know. And he's not the only one I like, I guess. I like Rhonda."

She frowns. "The physical therapist?"

He nods.

"I always characterized your relationship as...hostile." She says it tentatively, and he laughs again. It could be a nice laugh, with practice.

"She makes me feel safe," he says, then frowns and looks down at his hands.

Arthur doesn't speak again for the rest of the day.

#

“We’re flying someone in for you to start seeing.”

Mal pulls her reading glasses off and looks at the man standing in the doorway to her office. It’s Major Torres -- a field medic turned combat hero turned hospital advisor after he lost a hand in the field. She likes him more than most of the administrators she has to deal with.

“I have a fair amount of casework on my plate already, Major, so I’m not sure --”

He cuts her off. “I think you’re gonna be interested in taking on this case. It’s Office Eames of the British Royal Air Force. Prisoner A from the DLF hostage--”

“I get it,” she snaps, and sighs. “It’s not like I’m doing a spectacular job with fellow prisoner; I’m not sure what I’ll be bringing to the table for Officer Eames’ treatment.”

“I’d imagine there’s quite a bit of overlap.”

“You would be surprised,” she says wryly. “Maybe I could do joint sessions with Eames and Arthur.”

He shakes his head. “Not...you can’t initially. Eames became very fixated on Arthur, and his other doctors feel like it truly hinders his recovery. You can let him know Arthur is safe and receiving care but there’re orders not to introduce them until you think Eames is more stable.”

“That seems unwise at best, Major.”

“His doctors are afraid of a relapse.” The sincerity isn’t there and they both know it.

Mal frowns and resolves to win this fight. “I’m his doctor now, and I think that decision should be left up to my discretion.”

“You’d be right if that were the real reason.” Major Torres sighs and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I told the other guys you wouldn’t buy it.” He tosses some folders on her desk.

Mal opens the top one, starts flipping through it. “You mean they want him stable enough and independent enough to start in dreamshare again. That’s what you mean, isn’t it?”

“That’s part of it. What we really need is to keep them from colluding with each other. We don’t have a clear statement from either of them. Your boy, Arthur, doesn’t talk. Eames apparently can’t stop talking, about everything except what happened.”

“Selfish,” she says, shaking her head.

“Hey,” he says, “I don’t make the rules. I tried, Dr. Cobb.”

“I know,” she says, and she does believe that. She’ll try it their way for as long as she can stand it, at least.

+

Eames knows he’s not getting anywhere, but he isn’t sure why that necessitates getting flown all the way to America.

“You’re telling me there’s a doctor there who knows something you don’t? Because your lot’s been trying to convince me you know everything since I’ve gotten here,” Eames says. He’s lounging on the bed in his room,

His nurse is packing up his few things -- clothes and books brought by his mum, mostly -- and she frowns at him.

“You should be grateful for all this, Officer Eames,” she says, “that you’re going to the place that has nothing but specialists for you.”

“Grateful that I go from one prison to another to another?”

“Grateful that you’re not dead,” she snaps. “That you got out. Not everyone is so lucky.”

There’s a long beat of silence before she starts apologizing and he cuts that off, just asks “Who...?”

“My sister,” she says and zips up his bag.

“I see. My condolences,” he says, and she nods.

“It’s not a prison, Officer. It’s like a second chance.”

Eames thinks about that when she leaves. He’s glad he’s not dead, yes. But Eames prefers to make his own self, his own luck, and he doesn’t need anyone to manufacture some kind of story for him, that he can heal and be the same person he once was. There’s no second chance for that man, he knows. He’ll find who it’s a chance for soon enough, he presumes, and settles in to wait.

#

Mal sees Arthur flinch for the first time when she brings in the PASIV device. His eyes darken as they move from the silver briefcase to her face, and he crosses his arms in front of his chest.

"No."

The voice is full, the timbre of his voice mahogany and dark. It's first time he's spoken at full volume.

She almost laughs. She'd seen his research. He used to have to be dragged away from the device, her husband told her. Instead, she says, "Arthur, the chemicals are much more refined then they --"

"No."

She lays the case down on the bed near his legs, where the good one was once shackled to the frame. "It's required,” she says, “for someone in your position, to try out the PASIV therapy."

"How," Arthur starts, glaring, "would your husband like it, knowing it's like this."

Mal knew it, of course she knew it, that they'd been partners. They're co-authors on at least two published works.

But she doesn't want to confront it.

"The compounds are different now --" she starts, but he's staring at her, eyes narrowed and serious.

"You're going to use it anyway, aren't you? Going to break right in and take what you want? That was always the end goal, right?"

The set of his jaw is sharp, she imagines she can hear his teeth scraping against each other. His hands are bony and clenched white against the railings of his bed.

Mal won't look away, she thinks, and says, "Well, isn't that what you've been trained for? Isn't that what you do?"

Arthur swallows hard and she watches the muscles under his eye twitch. "Yes," he says, "it is. But you know why it's different."

She looks down at the device in her hands, her carefully painted nails.

"Maybe. But we both have our orders."

He looks like he's going to laugh for a second, but it passes.

“Arthur, I’ll put it away for now, but you’re going to see it again,” she says.

#

"Oh, they've brought me some fresh meat," Eames says the first time he meets her.

He smiles at her and it unnerves her in a way she can't quite place.

"I'm Dr. Mal Cobb," she says, making sure to stand with her back straight, and shakes his hand.

"Do forgive my not getting up," Eames says, gesturing to his legs. "I presume you're the doctor whose expertise was worth flying me halfway across the world for?"

Mal looks at him, his incredibly expressive face, and reminds herself of his case file. She pulls a chair up so that she's seated near his bed.

"That's right, Eames," she starts, pulling out a notebook. "I've been told you're something of a troublesome patient."

He grins. She thinks he's going for a roguish effect but it just looks sad -- his face hasn't quite finished filling in yet, the gauntness of malnutrition hanging under his eyes, in his cheekbones.

"It's all true, whatever you've heard," he says, settling back into his pillows. "I'll cop to it. Solitary confinement tends to do that to a man, though. Makes him ornery. Bad with people."

"So," she starts, settling into the visitor's chair, "why are you here then?"

He isn't smiling when he answers. "I'm told you can make me better. There are very few licensed doctors who are also familiar with PASIV tech, as I'm sure you're aware."

She leans back into the chair and opens her Moleskin notebook, clicks her pen. "So you're here because someone thinks you can get better."

Eames nods. "Are you going to tell me that you can't?"

"I want to know if _you_ think you can get better. I especially need to know if you _want_ to get better."

He frowns at her and then looks down at his feet, covered in angry looking scars. "I don't think I can get much worse," he says, "and I don't want to get any worse."

Mal nods. "I can work with that."

\--

Mal can’t help but keep pushing. She’s been ordered to, in fact, which she resents but won’t fight yet. She’s curious enough to want to get into Arthur’s head on her own, so she shows up to their therapy session with a PASIV a second time.

"There's only one place that thing is going to take me." Arthur's looking slightly better -- Mal knows his sleeping meds have been adjusted, and he looks less deathly pale. But it just makes his anger worse, more powerful.

"We could go anywhere in the world, Arthur. We could go somewhere that isn't even on Earth. Where's your sense of imagination?" Mal asks, and he stares.

"I left it in Kandahar."

Arthur asks for a cigarette.

Patients like Arthur, recalcitrant, foul-mouthed, tight-lipped, and angry don't get to smoke. Mal says she can't, it's against regulation, instead of telling him she's sick of his shit, of his attitude. It feels good to have this power over him, the way he wields his words over her.

She feels the shame an hour later and it catches her by surprise.

\--  
Arthur wakes up the next morning and can still feel the grit of sand between his molars, the tiny sharp crack of glass as he grinds his jaw together.

He brushes his teeth til his gums are ragged, bleeding, and he can't open his mouth.

It's terror, maybe, that makes it hard to let go of the toothbrush, that makes his grip white-knuckled and his hands shake. But he doesn't want to go back there again, not alone.

#

Something about Arthur in the hospital issue t-shirt and sweats feels off to Mal. He seems to feel it too, covering himself up when he can, arms folded.

He's too exposed -- his youth is on display.

There's a tattoo that peeks out from his shirt sleeve. She's seen it before -- photos of his squad mates, and the few survivors that had made it through the ambush and back home. He doesn’t talk about them, either, but Mal is determined to pull something out of him.

"So what happened to the girl you befriended at the dream training?" Mal asks. Sometimes Arthur references her, though it took Mal a few days to realize she was real, and not an extensive metaphor.  
"Ariadne?" Arthur asks, suspicious. "She was in my platoon during my last hop."

Mal just looks encouraging, nodding at him sagaciously.

"She died, alright." Arthur is speaking like a gunshot, clipped. "She died when the IED went off and she was keeping an eye out. Wasn't even making combat pay.”

"Did you love her?" Mal asks, trying to gentle her tone. Maybe this is the break through she'd been waiting for, the way Arthur softens a little when he talks of his fellow Marines, the way he smiles just a little at Ariadne's name.

He just stares at her. "Not everything," he says, "is about fucking love."

#

Eames is allowed to smoke in his room. His physical therapy is spent with his feet in a tub of paraffin wax to help soften the scar tissue there, and he has to pick marbles off the floor with his toes.

"Hello, my lovely doctor," he says when she enters his room. His feet are covered in wax, and he's smoking. His smile looks almost sincere.  
She returns it, trying to be courteous.

Eames loves to talk. She's heard about his life as an only child, his oldest brothers, his mother's tragic death, how his parents are taking a cruise. He's not dissociative and he's not trying to fool her, really. He admits readily to lying, bald-faced, but when she asks him what's true he just smiles.

"Isn't it your job to ferret that out, Doctor?"

What he won't talk about is his time in what her patients collectively call The Pit. It's not the same place, of course -- the hostages were scattered, hidden away in pockets. But it's the same hell.

She's read the reports but they only get so far.

Mal picks up the paper cup of glass marbles. They shine even in the dull light of Eames' room.

"I'm getting quite dexterous, you know," Eames says, a little delightedly.

\--

The knock at the door is unfamiliar and that sets Arthur on edge, but it swings open to reveal Mal standing there, her hand on a significantly shorter shoulder.

“Ari...Ariadne?” Arthur says and for a second he wants to lunge out of bed to hug her. But he can’t move that fast and she beats him to it, bounding up to the side of his bed.

She hugs him, gently, and he squeezes her as tightly as he can manage.

“Blue pulled me out,” she says without prompting. “The whole thing was so classified though, don’t blame Dr. Cobb here for not knowing, since she’s the one who finally fucking cleared me to visit.”

“You’ve been trying...?”

She nods. “I live closest -- Rodriguez and Blue are with their parents, and Blue’s girlfriend’s came back, so it was up to me to try to either visit you or spring you.” She smiles but there’s something there that’s dark.

“What about Nguyen? Is he back at his sister’s?” Arthur can feel his face moving into an expression of concern, and it startles him to feel all those muscles move.

“He, uh,” Ariadne says, and she grabs his hand. He’s too startled to do much more than jerk but her grip is strong and she looks at him. “We tried, Lieutenant, but he lost a lot of blood. He didn’t make it. When the bomb went off, everything was crazy for a little while. Shouting and you were shooting at some people, but one of them caught you from behind and we couldn’t get to you and him and --”

She stops because Arthur’s eyes are wide and he’s sitting almost perfectly still. Arthur knows he probably looks crazy but he can’t make his face go back to neutral.

“I’m sorry, Lieutenant,” she says, and he reminds himself to breathe.

“It’s,” he says. “Uh. It’s good to see you, marine,” he says and she smiles at him, a little weak but genuine all the same.

“Arthur. We were all so worried, and it must have been awful. It’s so good to see you too.”

He smiles and doesn’t really know what to say. Mal brings Ariadne a chair and she sits by his bed and tells him about her life. She’s out of the service and in a master’s program, she tells him, and she keeps a loose hold of his hand the whole time.

Arthur nods when he should, murmurs in the right places. Eye contact is hard but he figures Ariadne won’t be offended. Touching her isn’t as difficult as he expected, though.

“I promise I’ll keep visiting,” she says when it’s over and Mal gentle leads her out.

“That’d be nice,” he says and he means it. Mal smiles.

#

“You know,” says Dom to Mal as she’s reading, “creative work helps the reintegration process of POWs.”

Mal wants to slam the book shut but instead she tips her head back in the recliner, looking at Dom looming over and upside down.

“Arthur can’t have a roommate because he sleepfights the ones he has. Eames hasn’t told me a single true thing about his life so far. I think these two have more than enough creativity without your input.”  
Dom can’t help himself, she knows. He wants to help her, is always bordering on desperate to fix problems. But he wants his Arthur back, she thinks, needs a partner who has time to handle all of Dom’s creative and radical ideas. She’s busy with work, with Phillipa, with not crumbling.

He smiles at her and she smiles back, irritation ebbing away as he rubs at the back of her neck with his thumbs.

“Maybe I’ll get them some knitting needles,” she says and he laughs.

+

"Some patients, you know, have holdovers from their captivity. Stockholm syndrome, or feelings of safety associated with the place they were held. I think your trauma is manifesting itself differently."

Eames is aware of all of these things but he isn’t sure that any of them apply to him. For one, he feels completely in control of his lying.

“What where you asked to reveal?” she says and he blinks at her.

“I think we both already know the answer to that, Dr. Cobb. I’m sure you were given transcripts of the negotiation proceedings and have probably seen the leaked information.”

“It might help you to talk me through it.”

“I don’t know if that would help _me_. Who do you think it’ll help in the end?”

Mal sighs. “I’m not part of a giant conspiracy against you, Eames. I just want to help, and if the governments involved in our situation benefit, that’s just a bonus.”

Eames looks skeptical. “I don’t know if you’ve figured it out, doctor, but my plan is to be as selfish as I can be while I’m here.”

“Then how about this -- how do you feel about dreaming?”

He grins at that but it’s not full of joy, just the zeal of anticipation. “Ah, Dr. Cobb, just what I’d hoped to hear.”

#

"Build, Arthur," Mal says. She's made the dream blank, malleable.

Arthur doesn't populate the space and he just looks at her. He's wearing a suit, she notes, not the hospital gown or the sweatpants and t-shirts she's used to seeing him in. His hair is shorn, military style, when she's only seen it long and curled.

This must be what he looked like before. He isn't gaunt, and his skin has a golden tone to it from a desert sun. Freckles.

Arthur is so young, she realizes. Two tours of active combat duty and now this.

"What do you want me to build?"

Mal is troubled -- most patients build without even being prompted. Some can't help it. "Anything. Whatever you want.”

"Do you want to see?" Arthur suddenly snaps. “Do you want to know where I lived? What it was like?”

Mal doesn't, actually. She doesn't want to know -- she's read the reports and seen the photographs of the people that had been traded, one by one. Arthur couldn't stand on his own, face gaunt and pale, hair lank as he was carried out.

The floor underneath them is shrinking, shrinking as walls rise up. The ceiling is low, sloping down, and she and Arthur must both hunch over, shoulders touching.

There's a broken pile of zipties, a blanket over a cot’s mattress, and a bucket in the corner.

There's dried blood on the dirt and concrete of the floor. Each detail is amazingly sharp, and Mal realizes Arthur must have each tiny crack memorized, burned into his eyelids.

You could sit and stretch your legs out if it was diagonal.

"A year," he says and she wants to scream.

#

Mal Cobb tries never to bring work home. It's easier to keep her patients' issues private, to maintain their confidentiality. It means she doesn't frighten Phillipa when they argue about Cobb's other job, the one where he isn’t just writing papers and crunching numbers.

But things at home are going so well, even when she hits a wall at work. It's not as hard as it used to be, leaving all her anger and fear at the hospital and then slipping into something comfortable when she steps inside her house, where her husband will be building towers with her daughter.

She cooks because Dom is hopeless at anything but strictly following recipes, and she finds that kind of repetition boring. They've been making their own baby food -- that's where she's grateful for Dom's consistency. Mal's carrot mash never goes over as well with Phillipa.

The kitchen is wide open, so she can watch her family as she works, unwraps thawed chicken and slices vegetables. It's overwhelming, sometimes, to recognize this scene as her life.

"What do you think about having another baby?" she asks her husband.

He looks at her and smiles, blue eyes lighting up.

"It'd be wonderful," he says.

She hadn't expected this. Wanted to tell him that she thought it was a selfish thing, to bring an innocent into a place like this. But she looks at his smile and thinks of it on a child, on a little boy, maybe.

\--

Arthur doesn’t want to talk to anyone. Ariadne gets frustrated but she doesn’t push him -- instead she brings books of puzzles and crosswords for them to work on when she visits.

He likes that fine. But he doesn’t need to uncurl anymore of himself; he’s vulnerable enough without words.

Reality gets no quieter when he doesn’t speak, though. It’s better this way, he reasons, because the lines of awake and dreaming have already started to run together. He thinks, sometimes, about how different this Mal is from the woman in Cobb’s mind.

Arthur sees Eames. Not often. Only out of the corner of his eye, being led from one office to another by a nurse or by Rhonda, always too fast for him to know if it’s Eames or just a figment.

He doesn’t want to be asleep. But sometimes he wants to shoot himself awake, open his eyes and be in prison next to Eames. To be thrown into a cell he knows with Eames’ warm body protecting him. Arthur wants this to be true so badly that sometimes his jaw aches with it, while his stomach churns anxiously, torn between freedom and familiarity.

#

These are the psychological effects of isolation that Mal expects: schizoid behavior, introversion, anti-social tendencies, depression, anxiety, and PTSD. There’s a list of what she expect to hear from them -- the guilt, the vivid memories and fantasies, the long stretches of boredom.

So far they haven’t quite manifested in a textbook manner. Mal had initially expected more anger from Arthur, but she got it in spades from Eames. Eames can’t identify it, the resentfulness that fuels him and keeps him defiant even when surrounded by allies and doctors.

She knows his family is influential and it’s her expertise combined with his utterly off-putting demeanor that’s keeping him in treatment. She guesses he feels abandoned -- no one is fighting to keep him safe, or at least safe as he interprets it.

She’s worked with prisoners and hostages before but none to this extreme -- people she’s seen have barely been held a month, if that. This is worse, something like a personality that lives on top of who Arthur and Eames actually are, built to protect and demolish interlopers.

Eames is the defiant one, but Arthur wasn’t the compliant one. He was the hopeful member of the prisoners, resolute entirely in the belief that they would be rescued. She wonders if this contributes to what happens -- he either believes someone will take him away from treatment, or that he’s finally lost hope, but she’s not sure which.

She admits, she didn’t quite expect the relapse. But Arthur stops speaking after their trip into his subconscious, and Mal seriously considers quitting.

#

The first time Mal dreams with Eames, she wakes up panting, terrified. She’s never been in a place so unstructured -- they enter a place with no horizon lines, no shadows. His dream is like visiting the inside of a color field painting, trapped in a maze on a Kenneth Nolan canvas, primary colors going straight through her imagined body.

She drowns.

Eames wakes up around three minutes later, and Mal has composed herself as best she could. Neither comment about how she failed to re-enter his dream, and his expression is mild, a curious head-tilt.

"What an imagination," she snaps, betraying herself but she's angry. Angry at herself, but also angry at Dom for teaching them this.

"I've been told it's quite colorful," he says, stretching and smiling at her. It's meant to be unnerving, and it succeeds.

"Maybe we should stop giving you books."

At that, Eames laughs, and it's not forced or faked. In fact, it's a little chilling.

"You think," he says, running a wide hand through his hair, "that books made me this way?"

\--

"I think I'm seeing things," Arthur tells her, unprompted, the next time she walks into his room.

"Oh?" Mal asks. She sits down carefully, doesn't want to startle him with fast movements. Arthur appreciates it while hating that it's needed at the same time, hating that he's still so skittish. It’s the first time he’s spoken in several weeks, though she’s started making him draw in their sessions.

"Yeah." He's looking down at his hands, opening the left one with the fingers on his right. The nerves are all fucked up is what his PT told her, but it's steady enough. He thinks he'd be fine with a gun.

"What have you been seeing?" She pulls her notebook out. This is something else familiar, somewhat soothing.

"What do you think the PASIV is good for?" he asks instead of answering, still looking at his hands.

"It's good for a lot of things, Arthur. I’ve had several patients do really well with dream therapy, for example.”

"I don't think it’s done me much good. I mean, where did all that extra training get me? Captured.”

“What makes you think you’re seeing things?”

Arthur breaks eye contact with her completely. “Don’t think I’m crazy.”

“Of course not.”

“I think I’m seeing Eames.”

She knows Arthur respects her enough to not try to explain the significance of that statement, but she’s furious now. Not at Arthur, whose eyes are wide now with a fear she doesn’t recognize.

“I thought I was dreaming at first but that didn’t make any sense,” he continues. “But how would I know? Isn’t he in England? I know he has a family to take care of him; I Googled him.”

“He’s receiving treatment in a,” she says, gritting her teeth and weighing her options, “highly specialized facility.”

“Okay,” Arthur says.

“Don’t. Don’t worry about it Arthur. It’s normal to want him to be here, yes? He’s probably the closest thing to safety you had for a year.”

“Yeah.” He sounds dubious.

“Try not to worry too much about it,” she says, and ends the session early.

+

Eames is tired. He sleeps poorly even though the bed he’s been given is better than even the one his mother had secured for him in the hospital back home. He sleeps contorted,

His feet are getting better every day, his physical therapist tells him. His muscle tone is returning, too. Each week he feels more like himself, looks more like himself. It doesn’t stop him from layering different people onto himself every morning.

He’s not sure what he’s hiding anymore but he intends to keep all his secrets.

The biggest one he has is this -- sometimes he sees Arthur. The back of his head or the hint of his nose. He can’t get close enough to check but he thinks he understands now, how one could get confused between the waking world and a dream.

#

Mal watches her husband in the living room, reading as she washes the dishes from the dinner he cooked. He keeps promising to install a dishwasher, but they're so busy these days. Dom's military contract is back to research rather than teaching and molding young minds, and it’s a relief.

He's winding down, looking through some papers from his research, and she's seized with a feeling of love. The slope of his nose and the bones of his wrists, the light in his hair. It makes her hands itch, how she loves him, the feeling in her chest overwhelming.

Mal wants to rip into him, hurt him -- so that even when he heals, he'll feel the ache of how much she loves him in the scar.

No, Mal thinks, the thoughts louder and louder. That isn't what her love for Dom feels like at all. She pulls her hands out of the sink where they've fallen still, disrupting soap bubbles and shaking her head.

It's someone else that feels this way, and it's not about Dom either. The wrongness creeps up and down the skin of her forearms, the back of her neck. She excuses herself, goes upstairs to her work bag and pulls out her tablet, where she keeps patient profiles.

She moves through them one by one, but she already knows who's pushing around in her head, and where this desperate hot panic is directed.

Mal knows it, she knows it but she moves methodically through the photos, to one of Arthur looking blank-eyed, skeletal. And the rush is there, the feral need to possess, to own, to reshape. The fierce and heady need to protect.

She can hear Dom come into the bedroom and has to stifle the urge to snap at him. She doesn't know whose peevishness it is.

"I don't like the new compound."

He nods. "Spillover effect, right?" he asks as he sits himself down on the bed. He glances down at her tablet but winces and shoots his gaze away as though he's been burned. "It's happened a couple times to me already."

Mal frowns. "The patients I'm working with...it's just too delicate of a situation for something that unstable," she says. They hate bringing work home. but this is work bringing itself home.

"C'mon, Phil's asleep. I think we can afford a five minute trip to Paris."

#

“You’re not hallucinating,” she tells Arthur. They’re in a dream because it’s the most private place she can think of -- there’s no one even around to eavesdrop because Arthur’s projections are hidden.

He’s relieved at first, more than even in their first talk about it.

“But how do you know?” is his next reaction and she sighs.

“This was classified, because both the Marines and the RAF wanted to make absolutely sure that you weren’t working with the DLF. You haven’t given me any reason to think you were -- you’re both just. It’s not surprising, how you are now.”

He opens his mouth and she keeps talking. “I say both because he’s here. You’re seeing him because I’m treating him. And you’re not getting better without him, and I’m not getting anywhere with either of you.”

Arthur looks lost, looks wrong sitting in a hospital armchair and sweatpants. “Take me to him, please?” he asks, voice small, and Mal can feel the tiny threads of her resolve and professionalism shattering.

She takes his hand and he lets her lead him.

\--

Arthur can't breathe. He can't do anything but stare. His fingers twitch but he can't move his hands any better than he can get his lungs to work.

Eames looks similarly paralyzed on the other side of the doorway, the hand gripping the doorknob turning white around the knuckles.

It's almost painful for Arthur to look at Eames' face, to see it that raw and open and know that he looks just as vulnerable to Eames, his lips parted as though there were words some place inside him that would be appropriate to say.

“You,” Arthur says. His eyes feel wet but he isn’t sure why he would cry.

“Arthur,” Eames says, and the unbearable fondness is there in the way Eames curls the Rs, and Arthur’s heart batters his sternum.

Instead of speaking, Eames just holds out a hand, palm up, and Arthur’s own meets it. Both have lost the gun callouses but there are new lines on their hands to join them together. Arthur’s slides over, wraps around his wrist. The bones there are familiar, and Eames smiles at him, gentle.

“Home,” is the first thought Arthur has and it’s startling in its truth.

Eames leans into Arthur, stubble grazing his face, and the kiss is just as gentle as their touches, close mouthed and soft. Eames tilts his mouth over Arthur’s ear, then.

“We’re going to get out of here soon,” he whispers, and that feels like truth too.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to jibrailis & recrudescence for their help, thank you to abuseofreason for her lofty and laudable betaing skills and being the most amazing help possible on this fic. Sources and inspirations for this fic include the books Blind Flight by Brian Keenan; Taken on Trust: An Autobiography by Terry Waite; and The Gulag Archipelago Abridged: An Experiment in Literary Investigation by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn.


End file.
